What Can Popular Music and Library Music Learn from Each Other?

Because library music is made with the specific goal of future media use, its consideration might seem incongruous with broader histories of popular music or irrelevant to challenges facing the popular music industries. Yet both popular music and library music are defined against a shared set of cultural and commercial values, and both have adapted to shifts in media production, circulation, and consumption. In this article, I consider how popular music and library music have engaged with notions of art, responded to digitalisation, and revealed assumptions about the cultural and economic value of music. A side-by-side comparison reveals similarities and differences between popular music and library music that help us better understand changes affecting them both, as well as how we listen to music and how musicians make money from music.