popular music cultures, media and youth

© 2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Sociology Compass 2/2 (2008): 388–408, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00103.x

Popular Music Cultures, Media and Youth Consumption: Towards an Integration of Structure, Culture and Agency

Andy R. Brown*Bath Spa University

AbstractYouth, media and popular music studies have developed in separate fields ofresearch, resulting in a lack of integration of key areas of enquiry, such as therelationship between the cultural and structural in youth music consumption andthe role of media industries in ‘framing’ such a process. A more recent focus onpopular music as a media culture suggest a way forward in exploring links betweenproduction, mediation and consumption of music and youth consumer practices.This article reviews three such frameworks: (i) the production of consumption,(ii) production of culture/cultures of production and (iii) cultures of consumption,evaluating their contribution to a more integrated understanding of how youthconsume music as a structurally and culturally mediated process. Controversiesover youth ‘download culture’ and evidence of regulatory changes in the globalmusic industry and its impact on how youth consumers can access music media,underlines the need to pursue a research integration agenda, drawing popularmusic and youth consumption research closer together. Yet it remains the casethat both approaches exhibit a structural vs. cultural divide over youth consumptionand its relationship to the global music industry, offering optimism and pessimismin equal measure.

How meaningful is popular music to young people? What role, if any,does it play in the formation of youth identities? To what extent does theconsumption of music by youth allow us to better understand what itmeans to be young at specific times? Are musical tastes an indicator ofsocial or cultural distinctions between different groups of youth and, if so,do they reflect or contradict those of gender, ethnicity or class? What sortof impact have recent changes in the global organisation of the musicindustry, the proliferation of music media and synergies between mediaforms, had on the way music can be consumed by the young and themeanings that circulate around it as a consumer activity?

These are all really important questions but they are also questions thatwe do not have any coherent answers to at present. A central reason forthis is that such questions, and the complex issues that they address, are

© 2008 The Author Sociology Compass 2/2 (2008): 388–408, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00103.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Popular Music Media and Youth Consumption 389

clearly interrelated but their study has rarely been so. This is not to suggestthat important work has not been conducted into these areas but it hasbeen work that has examined one or more of these questions in isolationfrom the others. Thus, the study of youth has been explored with littleor no reference to musical tastes; or youth ‘style’ cultures have beenidentified in which music is assumed to play a subordinate or peripheralrole. The musicological properties of recorded texts have been studied inisolation from the meanings they have for actual listeners. Or musicalconsumption has been discussed in isolation from its production or otherforms of youth consumption. Finally, the role of media culture industries,in providing the commercial context in which music consumption ismade possible and potentially meaningful, has been generally ignored byyouth and music-based studies.

While there are sound theoretical and disciplinary reasons for this lackof interface over the question of youth, music and media in the past,recent developments in the study of popular music and media cultureindustries suggest that a more productive approach may be possible, onebased on a balanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of existingresearch areas and the pressing need to draw from across these to meetnew research problems. For example, the controversies over P2P musicfile sharing, the initially punitive action of the recording industry andthe subsequent move towards protective copyright legislation and thedevelopment of ‘pay-per’ user software, is one such area that would benefitfrom such integration (for an overview, see Garofalo 1999; McCourt andBurkart 2003). Indeed, the noticeable shift from initially highly celebratoryaccounts of the revolution in music distribution provoked by ‘download’youth culture (Alderman 2001; Jones 2002; Kusek and Leonhard 2005;Mewton 2001; Merriden 2001), has grown more pessimistic as evidenceof the strategies of the recording industry to regain control have begun toemerge (Burkart and McCourt 2006; Leyshon et al. 2005).

Current media debates over the success of social networking sites, suchas MySpace, in offering a flatter more democratic relationship betweenmusic artists and consumers, also promises to manifest this sort of lurchfrom initial celebration to despair. What I suggest from this survey is thatstructural determinism and cultural optimism of youth consumption ismirrored in both youth studies and popular music and media research.What we badly need is a ‘middle way’, where the deficiencies of one canbe compensated for by the strengths of the other, and vice versa.

The study of popular music as media industry: From production to consumption

The study of popular music as a distinctive type of media industry andcultural form has, in recent years, become visibly codified with the emergenceof textbooks and related attention within media, communications and

390 Popular Music Media and Youth Consumption


cultural studies degree courses (see, for example, Longhurst 2007; Osgerby2004; Wall 2003) This development is broadly to be welcomed, allowingas it does a way of reorganising and reframing many disparate areas thathave existed under the term popular music studies (see Bennett et al.2006; Frith and Goodwin 1999; Hesmondhalgh and Negus 2002; Negus1996; Shuker 2001). Popular music studies itself developed out of a dialoguebetween the sociology of youth cultures, particular subcultural studies,popular music and musicology proper (see Frith 1978, 1983; Middleton1990). Recently, however, Hesmondhalgh (2005) has advocated the formalseparation of these areas of study, particularly over the issue of subculturalstudies of youth and music, believing this would allow the study of popularmusic and its reception and consumption to develop more fruitfully apartfrom theoretical frameworks that have been shown to hamper and restricthow music consumption can be studied. For Hesmondhalgh, the exclusivefocus on youth in the discussion of music consumption and the framingof such activity within the limiting concept of subculture, ignores the vastmajority of other music consumers, who fall outside of these framings.The perspective of this article is that the further development of a mediaculture industries framework within which to investigate popular musicconsumption, linking the process of production to reception and use, isbest equipped to addresses the problem of a lack of integration of soci-ological studies of youth, identity and consumption, on the one hand, andstudies of media and popular music, on the other, beyond the confines ofsubcultural theory.

The significance of this for the broader debates about the sociology ofyouth and the study of popular music as media, is that the former lacksa theory of mediation in its accounts of youth consumption, which isevident in the internal schism over structural theories of youth as transition(Furlong and Cartmel 2007; Hollands 1990) and those more theoreticalaccounts of youth as sites of resistance/anti-hegemony to media institutionsand products, which derive from the Birmingham subcultural theory/cultural studies approach (Cohen and Ainley 2000; Cohen 2003). Putsimply, such approaches lack a theorisation of the media industries and thestructural and cultural processes involved in youth media consumptionyet, in the case of youth studies, they have a very empirically richaccount of youth as actors within various social structures of opportunity/constraint.

By contrast, recent media and cultural studies work on mediated con-sumption and ‘active audiences’ clearly attempt to develop accounts of youthmedia industry interactions as symbolic and structural. However, the socialtheorisation of youth to be found in such studies is often empiricallyimpoverished. What is interesting about the recent emergence of thestudy of popular music as a form of media (see, for example, Wall 2003)is not that it can resolve these academic boundary problems but rather thatsuch an approach has attempted – by drawing on a range of cross-disciplinary



subject domains – to more fully theorise the reproduction of popular musicwithin the circuit of media communication: from ownership throughproduction, representation, mediation and consumption.

One of the things that such an approach allows is a richer account ofthe symbolic structures and processes by which meaning is derived fromstyles of music consumption, while always seeing such an interaction as a‘moment’ within a wider cycle of reproduction. Such accounts cannotresolve the issues occurring in related fields of study and nor should theybe expected to. But they do offer the potential for developing new direc-tions in the design of research projects that can more clearly appreciatethe role of symbolic consumption of media within particular structuralcontexts and the role that media industries play in providing some of themeanings/practices ‘in play’ in such a process.

In what follows I first provide a description of the shared theoreticalterrain that connects the study of youth and media-related consumptionwith that of the study of production and consumption within popularmusic media research. Second, I go on to identify three broadly definedbut conceptually distinctive areas of research: (i) production of consumption,(ii) production of culture/cultures of production and (iii) cultures of con-sumption, that all offer, in their distinctive ways, pieces of the conceptualpuzzle. I go on to pinpoint the valuable parts of this research and howthey can inform the construction of a more integrated account of youthmusic consumption. My point is that at present such approaches touchupon and offer various insights into the question but they are unable tooffer a definitive answer. The way forward I suggest is that the inter-connections between these areas need to be explored and this is best donethrough a theoretical and methodological concentration upon the musiccommodity and how it is produced, conceptualised and consumed.

Youth studies and the study of popular music consumption: Some theoretical comparisons

I want to begin by suggesting that the border-spanning concept that hasthe theoretical potential to link the different academic fields of youth studies,popular music and recent media research, is that of media consumption.

Clearly, the development of a youth entertainment economy, since atleast the late 1950s, and the rapid proliferation of cheaper technologies,types of media and media-related activities, has become a ubiquitousfeature of the leisure worlds of the young. One has only to look at thespread of and access to micro-technologies, such as mobile phones andMP3 players, among youth consumers to realise how much more mediatedyouth interactions have become but also the extent to which the mundane‘everyday’ use of such technologies is one of the ways that youth aredefined as a group, for example through the use of ‘txt’ talk (Furlong andCartmel 2007, 78–9; Miles 2003, 178; Osgerby 2004, 208–10).



The study of youth as a period of (re)orientation between that ofchildhood and adulthood, has always been centrally concerned with thetransition to work and the relationship between work and leisure (Furlongand Cartmel 2007; Hollands 1990). The utility of the concept of con-sumption, conceived as both an economic and cultural process, is that itoffers a framework for exploring how youth negotiate the fact of theirstructural situation in terms of the ways that they consume and the meaningsthat such consumption has in the ‘space’ of youth (Miles 2003). As wewill see, some theorists have claimed that youth creativity surrounding actsof consumption announce some sort of stylistic challenge to the hegemonyof the adult world or that the space of youth inverts the social and culturalhierarchies that govern that world. But these sorts of claims often leaveout the seemingly mundane and ordinary consumption of the majority ofyouth who may not appear to exhibit any stylistic distinctiveness but whonevertheless make buying choices about what to listen to, what to wearand what to do in their leisure time, which are acts of consideration andchoice that may often be invested with a great deal of significance. Whenlittle else seems to be under your control or subject to your influence, thesimple act of choosing one type of trainer rather than another maybecome a hugely important act of self-confirmation or assertion of ‘indi-viduality’. This clearly also ought to apply to the music choices that youthmake at different stages in their lives.

From a macro-economic perspective, fluctuations in the performanceof the economy and the availability of youth employment opportunitiesimpacts very greatly on the importance with which leisure is pursued asa end in itself and this is ultimately always a matter of availability offinancial resources. This is also because the youth entertainment economyhas become extensively commodified. But such commoditisation of leisureand its objects is to some extent an independent variable in structuralanalysis because the ubiquity of forms of leisure commodities and theireveryday uses means that many mundane youth interactions are predicatedon possessing skills in the use of such technologies and common knowledgeof fashion and media brands (Miles 2003). One cannot simply opt out ofan engagement with the currency and ubiquity of such commodity forms.Understanding this and the construction of youth identities as a functionof autonomy and constraint is now a central concern of work specificallyfocusing on the role of consumption in young lives (Miles et al. 1998).

This newer emphasis on consumption is also to be found in recentmedia and culture studies research, particularly that developed withinaudience and reception studies (see Corner 1996, 1999). In fact an earlyemphasis on consumption as a framework for thinking the interactionbetween media use and socially situated groups, was developed out offeminist media research at CCCS Birmingham (CCCS 1978; Hobson1982; for an overview, see Hermes 1997). But it was the development ofthe theorisation of reception, conceived as an interactional process that



required the role of reader or interpreter to contribute to the process ofmeaning generation set in play by the media ‘text’, that most importantlyunderpinned the emergence of research informed by an idea of the ‘activeaudience’, now a widely accepted notion within the media research field.

Although the original framework conceived of a moment of encodinginformed by media production and a moment of decoding, informed bythe socially situated resources drawn upon by viewers (Hall 1993/1974,2003/1980), it was the development of research focussing exclusively ondecoding that has received the most discussion and also has become thefocus of some strident criticism (McGuigan 1992). This criticism hascentred on the exaggeration believed to be implicit in such work invaluing or more often ‘celebrating’ the creativity of audience groups intheir abilities to derive both pleasure and social significance in their inter-action with various dominant media forms, irrespective of any otheroffsetting factors, such as minority or disadvantaged status. Indeed, criticsof such research as ‘cultural populism’ point to liberal and left wingtheorists attributing liberatory potential to audience interpretative practices,in the face of dominant media forms, that end up justifying market-basedmodels of media provision rather than questioning the content and pro-duction of such media. As some have pointedly put if, if audiences canmake anything they want out of media provision, the question of what isprovided becomes secondary to a focus on the activity of ‘appropriating’content (Budd et al. 1990; for an overview, see Stevenson 2002, 75–116).

While these debates have clearly been important in attempting tore-position the study of audience within the wider field, they have some-times obscured the strand of work that has attempted to develop a moresocially grounded theory of audience–text interactions and uses, by focussingon the wider social context and conditions of media reception andconsumption informing, in particular, domestic settings and relationships.While this work has sought to foreground gender relations as crucial inunderstanding the uses and dynamics of interaction over media use in thehome (Morley 1986; Gray 1992), more recent work has examined therelations of parents and children, over the use and access to computertechnologies, for example (Livingstone 2002). At the same time, otherwork, initially concerned with minority ‘interpretative communities’, hasoffered some suggestive theoretical insights into the role audience‘interpretative repertoires’ play in the transactional exchange of meaningframeworks involved in media communication processes (see, for example,Liebes and Katz 1993). The relevance of this work is in how researchershave tried to identify not only what interpretative repertoires attach toparticular groups but also the linking of these to social characteristics andcultural habitus (Schroder 1994). In some research this has lead to theclaim that interpretative frameworks do not necessarily ‘open up’ thecreative potential of audiences but rather structure access to symboliccontent in allowing connection to certain parts of the media text and



denying others (Lewis 1996; Condit 1989). The relevance of this researchto the study of youth and its interpretative and creative relationship tomedia resources, such as popular music, is one that clearly ought to bemore developed than it is at present.

In summary, and at the risk of over simplifying, there are some keydifferences of emphasis that highlight research priorities and frameworks,at present. Structural accounts of youth tend to concentrate on the con-straints upon and access to symbolic resources; media-cultural accounts,on the meaningfulness of symbolic resources and the activities that can beenabled via their uses. While we are still a long way from a fully developedtheorisation of symbolic commodities, particularly how we theorise mediaas a symbolic commodity, the majority of researchers are united in theacceptance of the idea that the ‘use’ of commodities, whether mediasymbolic ones or mediated material ones, is an ‘active’ process. Where theapproaches differ is that ‘active audience’ theories lack a theory of constraint,although they do sometimes invoke a structural idea of media environ-ments circumscribed by differential access to media technologies andresources. But we are far from a shared idea of what constitutes activity,what are its minimal and maximal features, and what are its ultimateconstraints? More specifically, how does the description and quantificationof ‘activity’ apply to meaningful engagement (reception/cognition) and/or types of observable behaviour (uses/interaction)?

Given this structural/cultural dichotomy what is innovatory about someaspects of recent research into popular music and media is that it offers arange of ways of comprehending how the mediation of music can providesymbolic resources that interact with the existing structurally determinedsituation that youth find themselves in. Such accounts can be seen totheorise media as a commodity that provides symbolic resources that helpto furnish the imaginative environments in which youth make ‘culturalsense’ of their existence through the activity of consumption. Clearly avalid criticism of active audience theories is that they over emphasise theeffectivity of consumption and its cultural impact on production. Butthinking about the role of consumption in the reproduction of styles ofproduction of cultural commodities is clearly important in understandinghow post-Fordist production regimes (marketing at niche defined groups)fold-back consumption into their marketing strategies. Here the recentdebates about the role of cultural workers or intermediaries (Negus2002; for an overview, see Delaney 2005; Nixon and Du Gay 2002)into the meshing of production and consumption practices, offers manysuggestive insights into how cultural organisations reproduce themselvesand how the development of cultural products arise from a complexinteraction between consumer intelligence gathering and productionstrategies (cf. Nixon 1997).

But such studies do not focus on the activity of consumption itself andthe relationship of consumption to types of commoditisation. In other



words, how do we describe the ways in which the marketing and designof youth media commodities allows the ‘furnishing’ of environments thatthey make possible or even fully determine? Alternatively, to what extentare such forms of music commoditisation merely the starting point for acomplex cultural behaviour that cannot be ‘read off ’ or anticipated fromtheir design and marketing? These questions have always been emergentwithin pioneer cultural studies of youth, such as Birmingham CCCSwork on subcultural practice (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979;Willis 1978) but such work was hampered by a wholly negative idea ofcommoditisation as a process that required youth resistance to produceanything meaningful and this struggle was only possible for a brief heroicmovement before it was incorporated back into the ‘system’ (cf. Brown2003b, 2007). Such an approach also, as a consequence of the theorisationof consumption as a form of commercial domination of youth, had littlepositive to say about ordinary youth consumption that was not subculturaland therefore exhibited no obvious stylistic resistance (Clarke 1990).

Accepting that commercial market processes are the necessary andcommon basis of the worlds that youth inhabit in their leisure practicesthen allows the opportunity to explore the range of ways that this rela-tionship is negotiated and understood. But it requires much more specifictheorisation and investigation of the commodity and its meaning potentialand how these elements interact with youth in various ways, than existsat present (see Brown 2003a, 2007).

In what follows I present an inevitably schematic account of threetheoretically distinctive areas of existing research, all of which offer importantinsights into the question of how popular music culture is produced and/or consumed and, in particular, how the symbolic value of music is mademeaningful within particular commercial processes and social practices.

The production of consumption: Marxism, political economy and the Frankfurt school

The important contribution that Marxist-inspired approaches have madeto the theorisation of the culture industries and the music industry, inparticular, is beyond dispute. Clearly, a political economy framework isindispensable to the analysis of the global patterns of ownership andcontrol that configure the logic and dynamics of the popular music businessand its reproduction. The capital-driven logic first evident in the consol-idation of national music markets, via strategies of horizontal and verticalintegration, as seen in the post-war USA, had by the mid-1970s, becomeinternational (Hull 2000; Sanjek and Sanjek 1991). At the close of themillennium a global pattern had emerged, whereby five multinationalcorporations owned and controlled up to 70% of the production anddistribution of all recorded music, via a complex series of mergers andtakeovers, that tied artists and labels to music divisions ultimately accountable



to corporate owners, such as Universal-Vivendi, Sony BMG, AOL-TimeWarner and EMI (see Figure 1).

Such patterns of concentration would seem to suggest that the majorcorporations have got the production and consumption of popular musicsewn up. But this is far from the case. The reasons that they don’t entirelyhas to do with what Negus has called ‘the enduring distance betweenproduction and consumption’ (2002, 501). It is the volatility and unpre-dictability of the consumption of cultural commodities, such as the musicCD or album download, that has necessitated the adoption of variousstrategies of production that attempt to shape and control the environmentof consumption, if not consumption itself. The value of political economyapproaches is that they attempt to show how production regimes try toproduce consumption, to shape it and mould it to fit their priorities. Thisultimately means that they also contain an account of the consumer as thesupport of this system of control. But the culturally mediated ‘agency’ ofthe music consumer, the choices and changes in taste revealed by whatpeople actually buy, has shifted very greatly in accounts of cultural pro-duction. And recent evidence about the reorganisation of the politicaleconomy of the recording industry, suggest it will shift once again (seeBurkart and McCourt 2006).

In the earliest and most influential accounts of what they called ‘theculture industry’, the Frankfurt school theorists argued that productioncontrolled entirely the types of music that was produced, the tastes ofconsumers and the even the way that the product was ‘listened’ to. Thus,

Figure 1. World music market share, according to International Federation of the Phono-graphic Industry (IFPI 2005). According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) the value of the world musicmarket is estimated at $40 billion, but according to IFPI (2004) it is estimated at $32 billion.



Adorno (1990) argued that popular music had become entirely commodified;that is, transformed from an act of artistic expression to one governedentirely by the logic of the production line. This process was one part ofthe strategy of mature capitalism to commodify culture and thereby furtherintegrate leisure with work by shaping cultural production to the demandsof the system. The result was that popular music became increasinglystandardised, composed to a formula with only minor variations betweenone product and the next, much like varieties of motor cars (Gendron1986). Here Adorno extended Marx’s notion of the fetishism of commod-ities, stressing that minor variations in very predictable types of musiccould ensure a ‘core’ standardisation while satisfying the desire for noveltyto be found in music consumers (Strinati 1995, 56–8).

Adorno (1990) went as far as arguing that forms of popular music were‘pre-digested’ and that they did the listening for the consumer! That isthe predictability of the product produced a consumer who wanted towork as little possible to understand what they were hearing (Adorno1991). At the same time this inattentive listening meant that novelty wasneeded to retain interest. The result was a series of faddish variations ona predictable core. To Adorno listeners were thereby infantalised – reducedto the level of children. In such a market environment ‘serious music’ hadlittle chance.

Such a view therefore argued that the music consumer was verticallyintegrated into the system by the logic of the production process: musicwas not only fully commodified, it had also become an agent of socialcontrol, soothing and placating the ordinary listener. All of this suggeststhat production was entirely able to control consumption and that patternsof tastes would be determined by the music business. Clearly, a variant ofthis idea is one that is fondly held by those who look in horror at teenpop records and artists and believe that their largely young audiences areeasily manipulated by a well-oiled machine that churns out the nextsuperficial hit. But the evidence of charts and industry statistics suggeststhat the market for teen pop is very unstable, that misses far outnumberhits, and that losses can be considerable until that elusive ‘hit’ artist isdiscovered (Burkart and McCourt 2006, 21) This produces an interestingcoda on Adorno and the Frankfurt theory: despite the fact that teeny poprecords all seem to ‘sound the same’, only some of them actually find favourwith teeny pop listeners!

Political economy approaches, after the Frankfurt school have placedthis element – the volatility of cultural consumption – at the heart of theiraccounts of the ‘culture industries’, stressing that the music industry, likefilm and other areas, is a risky business (Hesmondhalgh 2007). In fact, itis this element that can account for the strategies developed to control asmuch of the production process as possible, that we noted earlier. A keyresponse here is that of overproduction: which has been likened to‘throwing mud at a wall until something sticks’ (Garnham, cited in



Hesmondhalgh 2007, 22). This ‘hit’ then offsets the various misses. Relatedstrategies are the formatting of artists as ‘stars’, once they have a hit andthe development of genre categories in which artists can be placed toallow the maximum amount of audience recognition.

What this suggests is that, despite appearances to the contrary, there isa considerable distance between the production of popular music and itsconsumption and that the commoditisation of music, while it has allowedthe development of broadly defined types of music consumption, is not ableto fully integrate consumption into the preferred designs of production.

Production of culture/cultures of production: From filter-flow to cultural intermediaries

While the need for a focus on production as a ‘structure in dominance’is clearly justified in accounts of the music business, it is the analysis oforganisations, like record companies, that has allowed an account of culturalproduction that is variable, complex and even contested at the point ofconsumption. Such accounts of the record company as a cultural organ-isation with its own internal logic have emerged from research variouslydescribed as the production of culture (Peterson 1994) and/or cultures ofproduction perspectives (Du Gay 1997; Du Gay et al. 1997). The essenceof such approaches, when applied to the production of music culture andthe cultural commodity that carries musical sounds (the record or musicdownload), is that much of what is produced arises from the organisationallogic of institutions and the cultural workers employed by them, wheresuccess is determined by the ability to mediate the distance betweenproduction decisions and purchasing decisions. Where the approachesdiffer is over the emphasis they place on the relative autonomy of decisionmakers within the chain of decisions that shape the cultural product thatis ‘produced’ by the record company.

The first approach, the production of culture, concentrates upon under-standing how the symbolic goods of music are produced in particularcommercial and institutional environments that affect what emerges as‘popular’ and saleable and how trends and styles of consumption are to beexplained by the organisational behaviour of producers, working in par-ticular sorts of conditions (Peterson 1994, 164–6). The value of thisapproach is that it demonstrates how the symbolic value of music and itscommercial exchange is quite often an ‘unintended’ outcome of processthat take place within organisations whose success is determined by theextent to which they are able to control the business of producingmusic as a commodity (selecting artists, recording and producing them,promoting and finally distributing work), rather than the tastes andmeanings of consumers.

In effect, patterns and trends in music styles are less an outcome of demandfrom consumers and more the outcome of producer decision-making,



which is sometimes able to successfully connect with audiences and atother time, not. This perspective ultimately suggests there is considerabledistance between production and consumption and that producers are‘insulated’ by the very practices they have developed to control themusic market (horizontal and vertical integration, overproduction,differential selection and promotion) in the face of the unpredictability ofmusic consumers.

Models of the record company as a cultural organisation, such as theclassic account given by Hirsch (1990), suggest that it is useful to conceiveof the organisation as linear in design, made up of various departmentsand personnel who process the cultural product, shaping it as it movesthrough the system. This shaping process is facilitated at critical points asdecisions to select or reject involving personnel who effectively operate asgatekeepers. Such decisions are crucially influenced by what goes on ateach ‘end’ of the system: the so-called ‘in-put’ and ‘out-put’ boundaries.While the model clearly suggests that there will be an over selection ofartists at the input boundary and differential promotion at the outputboundary, such decisions will be made based on information gathering atthese borders by personnel assigned a boundary-spanning role: talents scouts,promoters, press coordinators and public relations officers. Such agentswork in the ‘field’ and within the ‘artistic community’ as recruiters and‘intelligence’ gathers.

At the output boundary are media ‘gatekeepers’ who offer selectivecoverage of new styles and titles because these products provide thepotential ‘content’ for newspapers, magazines, radio stations and televisionprogrammes. Thus, the problem for cultural organisations is not the totalnumber of products/acts given coverage but which ones! Since record com-panies are dependent upon radio and television to introduce new artistsand new records, the target audience for promotional campaigns aremedia gatekeepers or ‘surrogate consumers’ such as DJs, record reviewersand feature editors who serve as fashion experts and opinion leaders fortheir ‘constituencies’. This leads Hirsch to argue the media constitute theinstitutional subsystem of the cultural industry because the ‘diffusion ofparticular fads and fashions is either blocked or facilitated at this strategiccheckpoint’ (Hirsch 1990, p. 132). This is because consumer awareness ofthe existence and availability of new records is contingent on featurestories in newspapers and magazines, review columns and radio stationairplay. Record companies are highly responsive to feedback from thesemedia gatekeepers and the styles afforded coverage are then subject toimitation until a particular style or trend has been exhausted. The consumer’srole in all of this is the ranking of items that have emerged from thisprocess of selection and rejection.

The model assumes an oversupply of ‘raw materials’ filtered out atvarious ‘checkpoints’ by cultural workers whose behaviour is governed byorganisational, technical and economic ‘factors’ (Negus 1996, pp. 55–6).



The cultures of production approach challenges this nominalist rule: thatthe symbolic value of items is arrived at through the social behaviour ofgroups operating in particular environments and types of constraint. Itargues that workers do not simply ‘filter’ cultural objects that have nomeaning for them. Rather, the symbolic value of cultural material, such asrecorded songs, is culturally constructed via interpretative knowledgeframeworks that arise from the way that such workers mediate the spacebetween production and consumption (Negus 1996, p. 59). They are ineffect both producers and consumers and it is their ability to shape andre-direct the form of the cultural commodity so that it meets the expecta-tions of other cultural intermediaries in the production process thatcrucially affects what is actually produced. These others could be productionexecutives responsible for radio play lists or magazine feature editors lookingfor or attempting to anticipate the latest trend.

The term ‘cultural intermediary’ is a term coined by the cultural soci-ologist, Pierre Bourdieu (2002, 354–71) who used it to apply to a newpetite bourgeois class of workers who assigned cultural value (or capital) tonew forms of consumption. It has been taken up to describe the creativework of those whose role is to anticipate and promote new forms ofleisure and entertainment. In the work of Du Gay and Hall et al. (1997),it has been theorised as essential in understanding the shift from a Fordistto a post-Fordist regime of production and consumption in late capitalistsocieties, where the objective of cultural producers is to market not amass but a series of segmented or niche consumer groups, throughstrategies of targeting and product differentiation. The role of the culturalintermediary is to shape production to consumption via a system of reflexivemonitoring of tastes and aspirations and by shaping commodities to meetanticipated demand.

Such a model assumes that the boundaries of the record company aremuch more porous and that each of the agents involved in the mediationof the record object constitute a symbolic field or ‘circuit of culture’,whereby consumption is folded back into production at every stage. Thuscultural intermediaries, such as record producers, can play a decisive rolein intervening on the production of a group’s sound, in attempting toreshape it through group (re)arrangement and organisation of recording,so that the results meet the expectations of other cultural workers andwill therefore be considered ‘new’, innovatory or simply more ‘com-mercial’. A good example of this is the role of the producer, RossRobinson, in shaping the sound and dynamics of many of the definitivenu metal bands.

While some features of the cultures of production perspective can besaid to be anticipated by aspects of the production of culture model, suchas the boundary spanning activities of record company agents, the modeldecisively breaks with the view that the process of production of a recordcan be conceived as a linear process. On the contrary the production of



successful products in the music market is the outcome of a series ofinterlocking activities that are sometimes conflictual and contradictory,since each of the agents involved in the process is operating within acultural web of assumptions and anticipations of changing consumer tastesand demands. The successful cultural intermediary must find a way toarticulate these two domains. This uneven interface is clearly illustratedby contemporary Web 2.0 phenomena, like YouTube, MySpace andBeBo, all of which rapidly attracted the attention and activity of musicindustry intermediaries as well as the big players, such as Rupert Murdochand Google (Harris 2006, 6–11; Lanchester 2006; Shooman 2007).

Cultures of consumption: From stylistic rebellion to the selling of rebel style

As we have seen, cultural Marxist and political economy approachesviewed production as dominating and determining the shape and impactof consumption upon consumers and listeners. These structural accountshave been aided by cultural organisation approaches that have lookedmuch more closely at the process of production of the music commodityas moulded and shaped by a decision-making process ‘internal’ to recordcompanies. Cultures of production approaches have tried to narrow thegap between consumption and production regimes by theorising theboundary connecting role of cultural intermediaries and arguing thatproduction and consumption, in late capitalist economies, are reflexivelyinterconnected by a ‘circuit of culture’ that continually folds back con-sumption ideas into production. However, it remains the case that thereis still an enduring distance between the shaping of the music commodityfor consumption and the manner and meanings involved in its actualusage, despite attempts to anticipate and ‘build-in’ such uses in the designand promotion of it.

The Birmingham CCCS’s work on British youth style cultures was apioneer work in offering a view of consumption that did not see theconsumer as duped or dully conformist but ‘heroically’ resistant in theirability to reshape the commodity and its uses to offer a challenge to thefashion and entertainment industry by staging a ‘performance’ outside ofits logic. But it was no so very long before the system had caught up andre-commodified the said ‘DIY’ style, thereby reincorporating ‘street’creativity back into commerce (cf. Brown 2007; McRobbie 1994). Ifthis sounds a bit like the rebel alliance vs. the Empire that was very muchhow it came over in this neo-Gramscian take on a theory of consumptionas a sort of cultural deviance or ‘de-commoditisation’, where youth resistedthe logic of the commodity system in the name of class. The assumptionof the approach was that the structural subordination of working classyouths was concealed in the appeal to them as ‘classless’ youth consumersand that assuming such a role in the purchase of youth items, such as clothesand records, would further integrate them into becoming supports of the



commodity system. Their acts of stylistic rebellion were therefore viewedas ways of articulating a new language of class identity by disarticulatingthe consumer identities carried in consumer items and rearticulating theminto ‘spectacular’ alternative do-it-yourself styles, such as teds, mods, skinsand punks.

The influence of this pioneer effort on media audience theories, fansstudies and consumer theories is profound. But what has often beenmissed about this account is that it is, at bottom, an anti-consumer theorythat celebrates not acts of creative consumption but acts of antagonism toa perceived conformity inherent in consumption itself (Thornton 1995,93). It also suggests that the vast majority of youth, who are not subculturalstylists, are themselves dupes or rather ‘dull’ conformists in their ordinaryconsumption habits (Clarke 1990, 84–5).

The response of some theorists has been to assert that the ordinaryconsumption of youth is actually a creative and identity affirming activity,even though it may be quiet unspectacular (Willis and Team 1990; Willis1990). Post-subcultural studies have gone further in arguing that subculturaldistinctions, such as those articulated between musical tastes and youthstyles, are no longer a good indicator of how youth identities are actuallyconstructed and ‘lived’ (Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2004; Hodkinson andDeicke 2007; Weinzierl and Muggleton 2003). The starting point formany of these approaches is that there is no longer, if there ever was, aclear relationship between class identities and consumption choices,particularly in musical tastes, and that the huge proliferation of entertain-ment and music forms has allowed the link between class and identify tobe weakened, if not broken (see, for example, Bennett 1999).

Drawing variously on the ideas of theorists Michele De Certeau (1984)and Michele Maffesoli (1996), respectively, they have argued that what weneed to look at is the complex patterns of youth associations that accompanythe multiple consumer choices that young people make. The resultant,shifting and temporary affiliations that emerge are best described as neo-tribal in character. Thus, neo-tribal youth roam ‘nomadically’ over theconsumer landscape selecting and constructing their identities through thechoices they make to participate in different musical and youth practices,never settling on any one exclusively. For some, such behaviour is moreappropriately described as ‘lifestyle’ consumption, rather than subcultural(Bennett 1999, 607).

The question that emerges at this point is whether such creativity, inconstructing a mix-and-match ‘individuated’ identity, is a form of resist-ance? Certainly the inference of both De Certeau and Maffesoli is thatconsumers practice are ‘tactics of the weak’, since they have no investmentin the ownership of the property that they employ to entertain and amusethemselves. For De Certeau (1984) this is equivalent to poaching in themaster’s grounds, carrying away only that which is most useful and con-structing something out of the fragments. Such a view, as echoed in the work



of Jenkins (1992), has been very influential in fan studies and in celebratingthe creativity of media audiences in deriving uses and meanings from main-stream TV and film products (Fiske 1989a,b). Here the connection to classicaccounts of youth subcultures is not severed, since the marginal and dis-enfranchised are somehow able to challenge the hegemony of the media system.

The problem with such accounts is that they are theorised exclusivelyfrom the position of consumption and they thereby reproduce the distancebetween production and consumption, as a power divide. They alsoassume that since consumers have no property stake or control over thecontent of media, the media commodities produced cannot possibly makemeaningful connections to them, rather meaning emerges from the choiceand combination of often unrelated products, rather than commoditydesign itself. What is interesting about the veritable explosion of studiesinto ‘ordinary’ consumer behaviour undertaken by a range of scholarsrecently (see Campbell 1995; Lury 1996; Miller 1995; Mackay 1997), isthe evident lack of conflict between product design and the everyday roleand uses that objects play in the lives of consumers. This is not to suggestthat products and their uses are entirely circumscribed by their marketingand sale but rather that consumers are able to develop a number ofeveryday uses and practices that are entirely compatible with such products.

It may be the case, as theorists like Hermes (1995, 15) argue, that thesearch for specific types of meaning in the consumption of media com-modities is something of chimera since ordinary media consumption,including music, is inherently meaningless in itself. Rather, it provides justone of a number of ways to pass the time or offers a background soundtrackto other more important activities. Support for this idea is to be found intwo recent studies conducted with school pupils, in the age range 14–16(Williams 2001) and young people, 16–19 years, in various public venueswere music featured (Laughey 2006). Such evidence has lead Laughey toargue that the use of music does not ‘fit into spectacular systems ofsignification that are opposed to dominant social and cultural forces’ ratherit is situated in the ‘localised interactions that typify the ordinary, routineand mundane circumstances of young people’s everyday existence’ (2006, 3).

However, it remains a problem that studies of music consumption,whether seen as meaningful or meaningless activity, lack an account of themedia culture industries themselves and the music commodity, in particular.As the work into cultural intermediaries suggests there is also a need toconsider the informational and image flow that surrounds that commodityand how is promoted and marketed. While it is clearly the case thatproduction does not determine patterns of consumption what it does dois to provide genre ‘formats’ in which products are recognisable to audiences(Negus 1995, 388–93). One of the issues that remains obscured by thelack of a joined-up theory of the interconnection between production,mediation and consumption, is how genre formatting enables or constrainsactually existing practices and the extent to which changes in such formats,



via the emergence of hybrid or subgenre categories, arises from within orwithout the music industry organisation?

Conclusion: What sort of research needs to be done?

As Steven Miles has argued ‘the structural approach tends to draw apicture of young people as vulnerable victims subject to the ups anddowns of a market economy, the cultural approach all too often veneratesyoung people as powerful consumers of music, fashion and sub-culturallife’ (2003, 171). Miles goes on to suggest that youth consumption is a‘mediation phenomena’ (Holland, cited in Miles 2003, 176) in providingthe ‘arena within which the individual negotiates the structural’. ButMiles fails to offer an account of how such an arena is circumscribed bya process of media commoditisation, whereby the cultural production andconsumption of symbolic objects, like music CDs or downloads, attemptto anticipate the meanings and uses of recorded sounds for the young.

Our review of the established theoretical approaches to such a process,through production, mediation and consumption, reveals that no one‘moment’ can explain the process fully, although the ‘production of cul-tures’ perspective and its account of a ‘circuit of culture’ comes the closestto offering a model that shows how design, representation and marketingcan anticipate the range of possible uses and meanings a commodity, likethe Sony Walkman (Du Gay et al. 1997), can have for its users.

The successful launch and lifestyling potential of the Apple iPod (TheEconomist 2004) and its varied uses by youth consumers (as fashion accessory,download storage, mobile music library, activity file resource, etc.) isa more contemporary example of this process. But ultimately, the iPodcould have been an expensive market failure (and, in fact, was anticipatedto be so by commentators). The fact that it wasn’t is less to do with thework of cultural intermediaries in anticipating the range of ways in whichit could be incorporated into youth lifestyles and more to do with howits use allowed the interconnecting of various types of media (internet filesharing and download sites) and music sounds in a rapidly changing mediaenvironment. It is the ability to negotiate this newly emergent mediatedlandscape that distinguishes the age-group who most utilise MP3 technologiesin their music consumption behaviour.

Short Biography

Andy R. Brown teaches modules on Audiences Studies, Youth MusicCultures, the Music Industry and the economics and politics of PopularCulture. His most recent research has investigated Heavy Metal t-shirtcultures, Global metal fandom on the Internet and the contemporaryMetal music magazine in the UK and the USA. This on-going work hasbeen disseminated as a series of conference papers and recent publications.



Note

* Correspondence address: Senior Lecturer, Department of Media, Film and Cultural Studies,Bath Spa University, Bath BA2 9BN, UK. Email: [email protected].

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