Popular Music, Work, Crisis

Join us to celebrate the publication of two recent books from CAMRI researchers, taking different perspectives on transformations in popular music and work amid the unfolding digital and economic crises of the late 2000s and 2010s.

Paul Rekret’s Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2024) examines expressions of economic crisis and transformation in popular music, in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crash. From online streaming and the extension of the working day to gentrification, unemployment and the emergence of trap rap, from ecological crisis and field recording to automation and trends in dance music: Take This Hammer shows how song-form has both reflected developments in contemporary capitalism while also intimating a horizon beyond it.

Toby Bennett’s Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Record Label from the Inside Out (Bloomsbury 2024) is an ethnographic study of organisational transformation inside the music industry’s largest global firms, as they regained stability after a turbulent period of ‘digital disruption’. Centring not on artists and the most powerful decision-makers but on everyday experiences of work and back-office corporate employees, the book tells a different story of contemporary digital music – one more sensitive to the complex intersections that texture the conduct of work and organizational life.

With introduction and commentary from Aasiya Lodhi and Sally Anne Gross.