Over the last two decades the music industry has seen repeated transformation. A diverse array of digital skills and platform competencies is now a necessity for all who work in the sector, transforming what it means to be a musician, producer, songwriter, curator, label worker, or manager. There is no shortage of scholarship examining this phenomenon, but this work does not always centre the perspectives of those working in the industry. In The Music Industry in the Digital Age, Richard Frenneaux hopes to close this ‘theory-practice gap’ by combining ideas from scholarly, journalistic and online sources with interviews from professionals throughout the sector, some of whom occupy positions entirely created by the platform economy.
The author’s own background as a musician whose early career was shaped by Myspace informs this approach, and affords him access to industry insiders whose willingness to frankly share their views results in the book’s most compelling moments. Frenneaux is often able to identify appropriate theory to accompany these reports. For example, his preoccupation with shifts in industry gatekeeping is a strong instinct (Bonini and Gandini Reference Bonini and Gandini2019; Ng and Gamble Reference Ng and Gamble2026). He recognises both that the circumvention of pre-digital gatekeepers can lead to the empowerment of artists and audiences, and that the technologies making this possible have now been successfully reconfigured to produce ‘new forms of gatekeeping’ in the digital music economy.
On the other hand, this is often as far as the book’s core argument is willing to go. For example, a fixed set of core ideas is illustrated through examples and secondary sources to showcase the new reality of the artist-entrepreneur, whose responsibility to produce content and audience engagement on social platforms frequently overshadows creative freedom and fulfilment. This is gamely supported by the author’s industry interlocutors, but rarely does an overarching argument take shape about the nature of platform logics or the experience of working under them. The term ‘platform disruption’ appears frequently throughout the book, but its utility is limited without sufficient clarity as to its scope or meaning. Crucially, Frenneaux avoids identifying whether this disruption should be understood as of the music industry, or by it. It is evident from the book’s many examples and sources that platforms have become the bones of the industry itself, but the argument often treats them as an external force acting on its people.
Issues with the overarching argument are also compounded by a slightly muddled structure. Chapters 2–4 ostensibly each explore the reorientation of musicians’ creative and working lives around digital platforms from a different angle (collaboration, self-promotion, audience participation) but are insufficiently differentiated, returning repeatedly to the same claims under different headings with little or no development. Notable exceptions include a worthwhile diversion into collaborative Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), and the discussion of alternative distribution services Bandcamp and SoundCloud, for which the book contributes the interesting label of ‘quasi-platforms’.
Later chapters are more confidently focused on their specific topics, covering genre, mental health, and the influence of short video app TikTok. Accounts of the digital music industry’s toll on musicians’ wellbeing are an important addition to the book, successfully bringing together ongoing scholarship on this topic (Gross and Musgrave Reference Gross and Musgrave2020; Loveday et al. Reference Loveday, Musgrave and Gross2022; Musgrave Reference Musgrave2022), with examples of the specific stresses that arise from platform-embedded music practice. Elsewhere, Frenneaux makes some salient points about differences in the utility of genre between artists and streaming platforms. His discussion of hyperpop’s mediation by audiences and platforms also makes good use of Nowak and Whelan’s ‘genre work’ concept (Reference Nowak and Whelan2018). It is striking, however, that this section includes no references to queer culture, given its fundamental significance to the development and culture of hyperpop (Affaticati Reference Affaticati2024; March Reference March2023).
Chapter 6 returns to the ‘evolving role of the musical artist’, unfortunately sliding back towards the issues with structure and depth seen in the early chapters. Happily though, it also contains some of the most absorbing sections in the book. These include insights into the professional pressures of Artist and Repertoire (A&R) workers in the viral era, and a useful (if rather overdue this late in the volume) application of ‘creative ambivalence’ (Hodgson Reference Hodgson2021). Frenneaux argues that artists must find ways to endure the top-down optimisation of their practice by platforms in order to be granted access to the markets and audiences on which they rely. Again, however, more critical depth in this exploration of artists’ ambivalent negotiation and adoption of platform logics into their creative identities could provide a stronger basis for further development.
Frenneaux’s goal of shrinking the gap between theory and practice is particularly visible in the book’s style and presentation. Press interviews, personal communications and primary research data appear alongside ideas drawn from academic scholarship and investigative journalism. In many instances this approach is successful, but the decontextualisation of sources is sometimes more problematic, especially when quotations from social media figures like YouTuber Rick Beato are treated in precisely the same way as those from peer-reviewed journals with no hint of which is which. I was particularly surprised to see the author quote from an apparently unpublished undergraduate dissertation, now accessible only via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The approachable writing is also occasionally let down by editing issues, including paragraphs duplicated on the same page and quotations used twice in the same chapter.
On first picking up The Music Industry in the Digital Age, I was cheered by the final page of the introduction, which urges the reader to ‘challenge conventional thinking’ about the industry. Indeed, perhaps I am myself guilty of an excessively gloomy outlook on music’s cultural platformisation (a word, incidentally, which occurs only once in the text, on p. 101). But for readers less familiar with the topic, this book’s combination of varied scholarship with accounts of how working in music actually feels is a welcome approach that could foster an attitude balancing criticality with optimistic creativity. Despite its shortcomings in execution, it is certainly promising to see such a worker-centred account of the music industry’s continual evolution.
