Writing about music, so Martin Mull readily attests, can be as laborious a task as dancing about architecture. Music, as an often ephemeral and precarious art form, invites methods of mediation in order for it to be, in Peter Mills' words, ‘captured’ (p. 2) or somehow preserved. In Media and Popular Music Mills outlines the parameters of his project: to ‘examine key ways in which media and popular music intersect and help each other do business’ (p. 1). It includes case study chapters on an eclectic mix of various media, including print journalism (focusing on music magazines), popular music on television, music and television advertising, public service radio and independent record labels. Using detailed excerpts from interviews with key figures from the British music industry as the heart of this thesis, Mills highlights the relationship between media and popular music in the UK. Each chapter reproduces the same format, beginning with an introductory synopsis of the media concerned, followed by extended transcriptions of interviews.
The first chapter is the finest, succinctly weaving in and out of practical and historical examples. ‘Dancing about Architecture?’ outlines a concise history of the popular music press in the UK, starting with Melody Maker in 1926, the arrival of New Musical Express, Record Maker, Rolling Stone, the short-lived Who Put Out the Bomp, Kerrang, Q, right up to the glossy fortnightly Smash Hits. Mills' interview with Mark Ellen, editor of Smash Hits, Q, Mojo and Word magazines, pointed to the gap between record sales and media coverage. Ellen's interview highlights the fact that the biggest selling artists of any given year vary significantly from the ‘cultural histories made that year’ (p. 25), citing the year 1977 as an example of the ‘rewriting of history’, where the biggest selling acts in the UK charts were the Bee Gees, Abba and Leo Sayer, yet these artists were seldom analysed in print media. Meanwhile, artists like the Velvet Underground, Nick Drake and Joy Division inhabit a space outside the pop music gossip circuit. Such artists thereby gained significance retrospectively.
Ellen's description of his most recent editorial post with Word revealed how vital a role the internet would play not only in this media but across this study; in this case the differences between printing a monthly hard copy of a magazine and the constant access to live, up-to-the-minute information online is a topic that seems to warrant its own chapter. Mills' interview with Lisa Barton of The Guardian also stressed the role of Web 2.0 on her career as a journalist. With the increase in user/reader-generated content filling our online screens, Barton maintains that ‘authoritative, intelligent criticism’ will continue to play an important role in music journalism (p. 35), and cites Pitchfork as an example of such intelligent online music critique. Barton's interview is perhaps one of the most informative in this book, as she offers some thoughtful, deeply personal observations from her career as a music journalist. Her interview reveals that there are two distinct functions of writing about music – that of the cultural gatekeeper and that of the salesperson (p. 37). In analysing Barton's interview, Mills asserts that art is not entirely understood by market value or ‘whether we feel we have had our money's worth’ (p. 35). Such observations appear flippant when glossed over as quickly as they sometimes are in this book. Yet perhaps more detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this study.
Media and Popular Music offers some thought-provoking insights into how popular music and media operate in contemporary British culture, and uniting various media together in one text is certainly useful in gaining an understanding of both practical and philosophical issues surrounding the music industries and their contemporary mediation. The detailed transcript Q & A's included in each chapter are punctuated by some reflexive commentary by Mills. This formula, although clear and informative to a point, proves rather tiresome, especially by the time we reach Chapter 5 when the interviews with Ben Watt of Buzzin' Fly Records and Steve and Emma Rusby of Pure Records begin to read like one of the music magazines mentioned in Chapter 1. For a brief study such as this (148 pages), the verbatim interviews could have been condensed in favour of original analysis from the author.
To return, for a moment, to one of the book's central themes: how will (print) mediums survive in an age in which fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for their information? Alas, despite the recurring theme, this question remains unanswered, and only barely acknowledged, throughout this text. Nowhere is this more evident than in the conclusion, which at a mere five sentences in length fails to offer any real suggestions for the future of media and popular music studies. The ‘conclusion’ opens with a lament to the music industry's ‘difficult time’, alluding to the ‘disruptions’ (p. 148) that digitisation causes press, radio and television, but stops short at acknowledging the crucial factor: the internet (unlike, for example, Kusek and Leonhard (Reference Kusek and Leonhard2005) and Jones (Reference Jones2012)). It has been widely reported across various news and academic reports that by 2012 the collective ‘music industries’ had gained unprecedented revenues through (legal) digital streaming and downloads (through sites like iTunes, Spotify and Bandcamp), live music ticketing (with Live Nation ruling the roost), merchandising, and royalties from online media platforms such as YouTube. Such reports lead to Farviar's assertion that 2012 marked the first year in over a decade that the recorded music industry revenue is on the rise. (Farivar Reference Farivar2013). Understandably, one may not want to make predictions for the future of music magazines, radio shows and independent labels, but a deeper, more rigorous engagement with these real issues would undoubtedly have provided a more rewarding read. Again, though, this may be an unfair criticism, as clearly the remit of this particular study was fixed in line with the Media Topics series, which offers ‘critical overviews’ on media theory and history, politics, ethics and culture, to name but a few.
Media and Popular Music offers some thought-provoking insights into how popular music and media operate in contemporary British culture, and uniting various media together in one text is certainly useful for understanding the relationship between the music industries and mediation. It is an ideal supplement to an introductory media module. Each chapter ends with exercise questions for readers to undertake, which makes this text most suited to college and undergraduate students across the disciplines of media, communication, industry and popular music studies. Overall, Media and Popular Music provides the reader with a survey-style overview of various media platforms and their interactions with popular music. However, the limitations of this study as well as the disappointing conclusion leave this reader feeling rather short-changed.
