Product Description: Keith Negus addresses both the novice Dylan fan and the longtime listener in his new book, Bob Dylan. Negus first approaches the man as a mythical cultural figure before situating the music within the larger folk and blues tradition...read more

Product Description: 'There have been few critical engagements with the concept of creativity in recent years, so the authors provide an important contribution in drawing attention to what is arguably at the heart of much of what we most value in culture' - Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles 'In this important book, Keith Negus and Michael Pickering challenge commonplace assumptions about creativity and casual invocations of genius...read more

Music Genres and Corporate Cultures explores the seemingly haphazard workings of the music industry, tracing the uneasy relationship between economics and culture; `entertainment corporations' and the artists they sign. Keith Negus examines the contrasting strategies of major labels like Sony and Polygram in managing different genres, artists and staff. How do takeovers affect the treatment of artists? Why has Polygram been perceived as too European to attract US artists? And how did Warner's wooden floors help them sign Green Day? Through in-depth case studies of three major genres; rap, country, and salsa, Negus explores the way in which the music industry recognises and rewards certain sounds, and how this influences both the creativity of musicians, and their audiences. He examines the tension between raps public image as the spontaneous `music of the streets' and the practicalities of the market, and asks why country labels and radio stations promote top-selling acts like Garth Brooks over hard-to-classify artists like Mary Chapin-Carpenter, and how the lack of soundscan systems in Puerto Rican record shops affects salsa music's position on the US Billboard chart. Drawing on over seventy interviews with music industry personnel in Britain and the United States, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures shows how the creation, circulation and consumption of popular music is shaped by record companies and corporate business styles while stressing that music production takes within a broader culture, not totally within the control of large corporations.

Product Description: Introduces students to the most significant debates in the field, offering fresh perspectives and suggesting new directions. Genuinely interdisciplinary on scope, the book outlines the history and development of popular music studies while offering and unprecedentedly international perspective on popular music, featuring writers from North and South America, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In recent years `culture' has become a central concern in a wide range of fields and disciplines. This book introduces the main substantive and theoretical strands of this `turn to culture' through the medium of a particular case study: that of the Sony Walkman...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This is a critical introduction to the key theoretical issues which arise in the study of contemporary popular music. The book is organized in a way that shows how popular music is created across a series of relationships that link together industry and audiences, producers and consumers.

Product Description: Producing Pop provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes analysis of one of the world's major entertainment industries. Focusing on the contribution of recording industry personnel, it challenges the simplistic assumption that pop music is merely determined by corporate financial interests, and argues against writers who portray the music business as a cultural assembly line...read more