Textbooks about the music industry written even a decade ago are usually inadequate at describing the contemporary state of the industry. Although many older concepts established to analyse the way music is provided within a commercial context remain useful, they are no longer adequate on their own. The central change any new textbook in this area needs to respond to, of course, is the rise of digital forms of distribution and promotion and their take-up by consumers. Wikström's contribution to Polity's Digital Media and Society Series obviously emphasises digital music as a key concept, but it does this through a developed engagement with many of the central issues of the music business. In Wikström's words, he aims to ‘examine how digital technologies affect the production, promotion, distribution and consumption of music and reveal how the music business is being fundamentally transformed in order to survive in the digital age’ (p. 35).

Wikström starts his account with the idea that the supply of music has been transformed, both by its availability within the internet ‘cloud’ and the use of Web 2.0 technologies by music consumers to engage with that music. These two metaphors are used to argue that the connections between music fans have been increased by the deployment of digital and internet technology, while music industry control has been reduced. The author suggests that this is accompanied by a move to the provision of music as a service, rather than as a product, and a far greater participation by music fans in music making and distribution. Using an informative account of how other theorists have explained or analysed the music industry, Wikström presents his central thesis: that music is now supplied by a ‘copyright industry’.

By placing copyright at the centre of the business activities built around music, the book provides a very distinctive and thought-provoking position from which to examine other matters, including the organisation of the industry, musical media and the production and consumption of recorded sound. Of course, this approach is actually an extension of a much longer-established approach to studying music, which sees it as an industrially produced artefact, and assumes that the way to understand the music which is available to us is to examine how it is packaged and sold. He derives most of his analysis from economics, and perhaps one of the most useful attributes of this book for scholars of music is that it contextualises and summarises key relevant economic literature that can be used to understand the functioning of the dominant music industry. He also draws upon substantial data to describe the scale and dominance of the major record and publishing global groups, and he is appropriately careful to encourage readers to look for up-to-date information in a field which changes so quickly.

As one would expect from an economist, Wikström's main concerns relate to the way that we can understand the changes in the commodity form of music, and the way that music corporations have responded to a fall in their main source of income: sales of physical music carriers like the CD. These are the issues which structure his chapter on Music and the Media, where he looks at music licensing and new business models linked to downloading or streaming music. The later chapters owe more to approaches rooted in the sociology of the production of culture, especially his discussions of changing forms of creative labour, the status of the professional amongst music-makers, and the idea of the artist as brand. The strength here is in providing some useful analytical categories, along with some well-chosen examples. These allow us to think through the creation, performance and representation of music in a systematic way. The final substantial chapter is entitled ‘The Creative and Social Music Fan’, but it continues the general thrust of the book by focusing on the debate about the impact of downloading on music sales, and the industry responses to unlicensed sharing as piracy. Although he is careful to note that it is difficult in empirical terms to judge if there is such an impact, his use of industry discourse in discussing the matter closes down the debate too far. In this discussion, consumption creativity is primarily examined in terms of its economic and process role for the commodification of music.

Matters of economics have been relatively neglected in the study of music, and this book provides a good starting point for those who want to know more. I think this book will be adopted as a core text in courses which have a strong emphasis on understanding the music industry in its dominant form because of its strong survey style, attention to some of the key contemporary debates, and its illuminating examples. Although the written style is not particularly lively, and students from outside the social sciences may find it harder to grapple with, Wikström is consistently clear in the points being made. I suspect this book's strengths, and the fast-changing nature of its subject, will mean it goes into a second edition. That would also allow some of the proofing errors to be corrected.

The availability of a core book like this, which provides a sound basis for grasping and applying key economic and process models, should also spur us to ask what more we require to adequately understand and engage with this fast-changing technological, economic and cultural domain. Given that most of the readers of this book are likely to be students who are on broadly vocational courses, and who want to work in the industry, the issues are sometimes presented in an abstract fashion, and the debates contextualised in quite a narrow scope. Although the promotional material targets the book at media, cultural and music studies along with the social sciences, students in these former disciplines are likely to miss many of the approaches which make their studies productive.

So, the discussions of music in the media are structured solely from the point-of-view of the financial benefits of the major corporations that are at the centre of this study. While the relationships between ‘independent’ and major music organisations are discussed, particularly in terms of their historical relationship, we really need a fuller and better informed discussion of the opportunities opening up for such organisations. Likewise, I would have expected to see a greater emphasis on understanding the roles of new entrants to the music industry – as different as Apple, LastFM and Spotify – which are used as examples but not studied. Cultural Studies also has much to contribute in this area, both in trying to grapple with the professional cultures of industry workers in all sizes of organisations, as well as in understanding the role of symbolic goods in these copyright industries. Many of the books cited in the early chapters provide a starting point, but these aspects of their work are not included here. The legal arrangement of the core concept of intellectual property is also treated as a given, when many of the examples used in the book show that it is unstable, contested and determined by struggles for political economic control. Work in this area could also benefit from a more philosophical approach, where we rethink many of our unquestioned assumptions. It is far too easy when studying the music industry to be captured by the self-interested rhetoric produced by the industry, and some of the narrowly focused research sponsored by its industry bodies. That is not to deny the importance of music as an economic activity, but to widen the debate about how it can be thought through. It would be helpful to at least contextualise Wikström's three music sectors (music recording, music licensing and live music) in a wider sense of music ‘industriousness’. It would also be useful to locate issues that flow from the new prominence of online music beyond its economic value as a commodity, connecting them to its symbolic and cultural functions. Many people make a living in music outside of these massive, highly profitable and dominant industries. How they are able to do this is as an equally important part of understanding the music industry. The flyleaf gives the book a subtitle of ‘music in the cloud’. Although this analogy was coined originally as a technological one, and here is explored as an economic one, it is also profoundly a cultural one.

Overall, this textbook offers a significant advance on approaches limited by earlier formations of the music industry, but engaging with its thrust also reminds us that there is still much to do in scholarship to understand these issues in the round, and to make those insights available to students.