This is an extremely valuable collection of essays and will certainly act as a reference source for me for years to come. The volume is divided into two parts. Part 1, ‘Context’, discusses the recording industry as an entity both historically and in regard to the other two main music industries, live performance and music publishing. Part 2, ‘The International Recording Industries’, then consists of seven case studies. This approach recollects Wallis and Malm's Big Sounds from Small Peoples (Reference Wallis and Malm1984) but the range of case studies has a different object – to counterbalance ‘official data’ on sales of recordings generated for the most part by the IFPI which distorts the distinctiveness of local recording industries, even those within what editor Lee Marshall refers to as the ‘hegemonic mainstream’. So it is, and by Marshall's typology, we encounter distinctive domestic configurations of recording industries ranging from the power houses of France and Japan to the comparatively fledgling industries of former Soviet bloc countries (Czech Republic and Ukraine) to the contrasting fortunes and experiences of great and small ‘players’ – Brazil, South Africa and Finland.

In Part 1, Dave Laing's essay, The Recording Industry in the Twentieth Century, is particularly notable. Written with his customary transparency and fluency, Laing provides a compact account of the industry's history divided into five phases. Further, he is true to Lee Marshall's object in editing the collection – his essay counters ‘the Anglo-American bias of coverage of the music industry’ by indicating how the joint and several impacts of technology, copyright, media, musical and demographic trends and ‘wider economic forces’ were registered in the music economies of countries far beyond the USA and the UK. Equally, the essays in Part 2 all exist simultaneously as synoptic accounts of individual national histories of individual recording industries and as useful guides to the contemporary conditions of those industries. It would be unfair to single out any one of these as more compelling than another but perhaps a separate, concluding chapter was required to evaluate them as a whole; in the absence of one, the reader is left to make their own sense of why, to use Marshall's terms, the recording industry is not ‘homogenous’ but is nonetheless a ‘global industry’.

Essentially, the collection attempts to redress the balance between an overemphasis on the global power of ‘the majors’ (by drawing our attention to the hybrid and composite nature of various national recording industries) and to evaluate the ‘decline’ of the recording industry since the turn of the century under the impact of digitised communication technologies. Further, it also seeks to emphasise how misguided and distorting are the elisions between ‘the majors’, ‘the recording industry’ and ‘the music industry’. All of these are important and necessary correctives to category errors prevalent particularly in media commentaries on the industrial dimension of popular music, but perhaps, inevitably in an edited collection, there is a lack of system evident in the work. For example, the absence of a final, evaluative essay means an inattention to what, as Laing points out, knits together domestically focused companies with those globally active ones we refer to as ‘majors’ – the practice of licensing and the organisation of the distribution of physical products.

As the importance of recordings in a tangible forms slides further and further into history it remains the case that musicians remain largely reliant on external service providers of some description (managers, producers, production companies and so on) to advance what they imagine will be their ‘careers’. The persistence of a now reduced number of major record companies in the wake of the impact on it of digitisation continues to show that the internet is not the level playing field it is tempting to imagine it being. Put simply and by definition, small, local companies lack global power, they have neither the marketing nor promotional resources of big ones. If acts want to cross borders then, ultimately, and through the medium of licensing deals, they continue to turn to the majors to access those companies' accumulated expertise in regional and global strategic management. This is why it is far, far too soon to write off the majors, and with them the whole of the recording industry, in the manner of Williamson and Cloonan's contribution to the volume.

As the authors explain, their essay, Contextualising the Contemporary Recording Industry, builds on previous polemical pieces of theirs (Reference Williamson and Cloonan2007) which strove to show how the notion of a single ‘music industry’ dominated by the interests of the major record companies was always a confection. As they argue, recording's ‘economic dominance … was only ever something of an historical blip’ (p. 13) within which ‘the recording industry (…) was economically dominant for a comparatively brief period’ (p. 12). These assertions seem to miss the points that Laing makes in his essay. His ‘phase(s)’ 3, 4 and 5 are those which discuss the transformation of a handful of record companies into ‘conglomerate transnational companies’ (p. 40). In turn, and in the wake of the CD boom, these companies were subject to profound processes of merger and acquisition mostly by major, non-music corporations.

My point is that this is neither a ‘blip’ in terms of time – 45 years from Shake, Rattle and Roll to Napster – nor is it one in terms of capitalisation – the reach of EMI in 1931 was considerable, 50 factories, seven in Asia, three in Latin America (as Laing shows here, p. 35), at its height in 1998 the company had offices in more than 40 countries. Clearly, EMI no longer exists and this fact, alone, suggests that the recording industry has lost its music-industrial predominance, but this still does not make the major record companies a comparative irrelevance. For example, while the economy for recorded music may have shrunk dramatically and two majors have disappeared, the remaining majors have absorbed the catalogues and key staff of their former rivals. On this basis, they may be comparatively stronger than before. Certainly, if we take, as an example of major record companies' power, appearances of acts on Jools Holland's programme, or the acts selected as contenders for the Mercury Music Awards, then all of the emergent ones are either signed to majors (or to the ‘major’ independents). It still seems that market entry depends on companies with music market expertise.

To continue this last point, what this volume never does is to explain what is industrial about recording; consequently it does not broach what is industrial about music. The notion of ‘the recording industry’ seems to be inferred from the historic and continuing existence of record companies across the world which appear to carry out comparable functions: ‘industry’ in this sense is little more than a collective noun for ‘lots of companies’. When analysing ‘industry’ we need to specify how inputs become outputs; how the actions of musicians become symbolic goods and make profit for the companies whose own actions add value to those of musicians. Once we can do this we are better placed to understand the mode of the production of symbolic goods in music and therefore better placed to specify change in its industrial organisation. I doubt that, as Williamson and Cloonan have it, the ‘volume … (is) an obituary for the recording industry’ (p. 12) but, even if it is, it will certainly not be an obituary for the practice of music industry. It is the analysis of this practice that remains underdeveloped in popular music studies.

So recently have they been all-powerful, and so interconnected are the needs and goals of the main music industries, that it is strongly likely that the perspectives and imperatives of the major record companies continue to form the operational ‘commonsense’ of the creation of symbolic goods in music (consider Irving Azoff's ease of movement between music industries in this light). More, as the UK's major festivals are finding to their cost, a breakdown in the ‘star-making machinery’ of the recording industry means a struggle to find contemporary headline acts. Similarly, while the explosion in audiovisual media has made the issuing of synchronisation licences a lucrative revenue stream for music publishers, it is debatable whether this has compensated for sharing in mechanical and performance royalties generated by recorded songwriters in pre-digitised times. The International Recording Industries provides an excellent source of reference for the historical formation of the recording industry locally and globally. Clearly it is not exhaustive either conceptually or geographically (a case study of the South Korean recording industry is a key omission), but it is a stimulating work that will remain valuable to researchers for some time.