At the British general election of 2010, an organisation called UK Music published Liberating Creativity, a ‘manifesto’ consisting of the policy wish list of the national music industry (or ‘industries’ to adopt Martin Cloonan's preferred term). Such a move would have been unthinkable 15 or 20 years earlier when much of the industry still preferred to preserve its free market purity. Cloonan's valuable book helps us to understand the sequence of events and processes that precipitated this major shift in industry strategy.

The main and meatiest part of Popular Music and the State in the UK (Chapters 3 to 6) discusses, in case study mode, several policy trends or policy-related initiatives of the 1990s and early years of the current century. These are the orientation towards the ‘creative industries’ in general and music in particular of the ‘new’ Labour government that came to power in 1997 in Chapter 3; a sequence of mapping documents and problem-solving research reports more or less contemporaneous with the reign of New Labour in Chapter 4; the New Deal for Musicians (NDfM) training scheme launched in 1999 in Chapter 5; and, switching the emphasis, music policy-making in the devolved nation of Scotland in Chapter 6.

The introductory sections of the book are less satisfactory. They are rather miscellaneous annotated chronologies (from 1945 to 1997) of ‘politics and pop’ (Chapter 1) and ‘cultural policy’ (Chapter 2), which mainly concentrate on the activities of the Arts Council of Great Britain, an organisation that almost wholly ignored rock and pop music and only grudgingly gave limited support to jazz. These are very large areas and the brevity of the chapters means inevitably that the coverage is sometimes superficial and some important developments tend to be overlooked. One pertinent example is the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, mentioned briefly on page 24. This 1980s programme of support for micro-businesses and entrepreneurs is said by Cloonan to have been taken up widely in the music industry. It was also framed by a different concept of the atomic structure of the industry to the NDfM which was in essence an adaptation of a general plan to coerce un- or under-skilled youth into employment.

To some degree, these limitations derive from the book's lack of a clear concept of the state. Frequently the discussion focuses only on specific government policies, a position that implies that government and state are interchangeable entities. This is surely too narrow a notion, something Cloonan recognises en passant by noting that the education system and welfare system are also sites of state involvement with music (p. 24). His concern with the activities of the state-funded Arts Councils and discussion of a Monopolies and Mergers Commission report on parallel imports (pp. 70–5) also suggests that there is a more expansive view of the state struggling to get out, but there is no mention of the fundamental role of the Copyright Tribunal, which regulates the activities of collecting societies through its oversight of the fees they charge to broadcasters, concert promoters and other ‘music users’.

Another issue is the efficacy of the nation-state and its government in making effective cultural policy. Cloonan is sometimes strident in his assertion of the potency of the national level, and perhaps does not fully recognise two important ways that the national is circumscribed by the transnational. The first, which he acknowledges in his introduction, concerns the status of the oligopoly that dominates the popular music industry, in the UK as well as in almost all advanced economies. These multinational firms (Universal, Sony, Warner, EMI, Live Nation) owe no allegiance to specific countries, so it can be problematic for governments to adopt policies aimed at supporting national music industries. Secondly, the book does not directly confront the significance for music policy of British membership of the European Union and the fact that in many important areas policy is made collectively by 27 national governments rather than by each single nation-state. A current case in point is the issue of the extension of the period of copyright for sound recordings. Here the British government must accept the decision of a majority of the 27, among whom there have been strong differences.

The issue of limits to the national is raised in a different way in Chapter 6 which compares Scotland with similar-sized European polities Sweden and Ireland. It recognises the crucial differences between these nation-states with their own national collection societies, musicians unions and branches of major international record companies and Scotland, which lacks any of these because it is stranded between the status of a region and that of a nation state, making it more comparable to one of the lande in Germany's federal system.

These caveats, however, should not be seen as detracting from the significant achievements of the book, which is a major contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the industry in Britain over the last two decades.