The Global Music Business as an Information Industry: Reinterpreting Economies of Culture

In this paper it is argued that the music business should be regarded as an activity trading in information. The paper begins with a review of key themes in the conceptualisation of the music industry within the cultural economies tradition. These are the tensions between creativity and commerce and between global and local processes, and the characterisation of the industry in the terms of the flexible specialisation and reflexive accumulation theses. It is then suggested that these debates have downplayed a key characteristic of the contemporary music industry, its involvement with the creation, production, and distribution of information. The emergence of a global music business over the past decade is documented and analysed by means of this framework. Subsequently, two aspects of the integration processes taking place in the music industry are considered in terms of their relationship to the information economy: copyright protection and branding, and competition between producers of information storage and retrieval devices. The paper concludes that interpreting music as an information industry sheds new light on the music business, and points to important questions for further research within the information economy literature.