It is appropriate to review these titles together for both general and specific reasons. The general reasons devolve onto their different (but complementary) attempts to wrestle with, map and analyse the enormous upheavals in what is too easily misconstrued as ‘The Music Industry’ since the beginning of this century. Specifically, though, neither title quite gets to the heart of its ‘territory’.

Clearly, much has changed where the formerly core, music-industrial practice of ‘buying records’ is concerned: sales of recordings have plummeted; record shops, in fact whole chains of retailers, have closed; albums continue to be made but what tend to be bought are individual tracks. So profound and far-reaching has change been for the recording industry that two of the formerly ‘Big Five’ major record companies have disappeared – BMG in 2008 and EMI in 2012. The immediate difficulties that follow from this brief encapsulation of seismic change is that reading the runes or, perhaps, ‘ruins’ of the collapse of what at one time seemed an unassailable industry is a particularly challenging exercise. It is challenging because the temptation to identify the recording industry with ‘The Music Industry’ is such a difficult one to resist. Yet resisted it must be because, in order to understand what is industrial about music, we need to be able to see a range of complex practices involving the demand and supply of music products as a set of production relations.

In the days before Napster, the majors dominated the production and selling of albums and the production and selling of albums drove the bulk of the activity of music publishers and live agencies. Considered in this way, when the recording industry began to enter crisis it was reasonable, although misleading, to declare this a crisis for ‘The Music Industry’ as a whole. What helped to promote this mis-identification was, and continues to be, the political lobbying actions taken by the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) together with national music industry trade bodies (such as UK Music and the Recording Industry Association of America – RIAA). Together, these agencies have constantly and consistently proposed that all of the ills of the recording industry are attributable to the practice of illegal file-sharing. In this way, how music products are created and sold has been reduced to a caricature. ‘The Music Industry’ appears as one in which virtuous record companies, who exist only to ‘help’ musicians (together with national economies through exports), are being thwarted by greedy and insensitive music users. At the very least, this distorted account needs to be challenged and to the extent that both these volumes help in such a challenge, they are to be welcomed.

To consider the Rogers book first; perhaps the decision to use ‘The Music Industry’ in the book's title was the publisher's. This does not mean that Rogers follows IFPI's lead, but he does tend to make a related miss-step, which is to restrict ‘The Music Industry’ not just to the actions taken by music companies but to what people in music companies say about what they do. This may seem a strange criticism to make, but music industry is a joint activity, one undertaken by music industry companies with musicians, and there are no musicians in this study. What there are, are 30 individuals who have been questioned about how they see the impact of ‘digitalization’ on ‘The Music Industry’. This makes for interesting reading but sometimes there seem to be too many voices, too many characters. This impression is created because it is taken for granted that we understand what all of these people do for a living and, therefore, how each role contributes to industrialising music. My point is that ‘we’ do not – or, at least, that there is little in PMS that shows us how, why and with what consequences (for musicians and for music users) the personnel of music companies do what they do to produce music goods for sale in music markets.

What Rogers does well is to work through all of the different upheavals and types of upheavals that have occurred since 2000 – file sharing, job cuts in record companies, changes in recorded formats, the rise of supermarkets as record retailers, the increasing centrality of synch deals, the battles over copyright, the rise of the 360-degree ‘deal’, and so on. This is an almost Herculean task and it is good to have all of this chronology in one place. He also reaches sensible conclusions – notably that ‘the terminal decline of corporate power … remains … a distant and unlikely outcome’ (p. 199). However, along the way, key issues are either ducked or go unrecognised. This happens because the other ‘players’ in the music industry mode of production are absent from the analysis (or are present only by inference): where are the musicians who have taken the DIY option? Where are the music users who have changed how (and perhaps why) they use music? Where are the markets for music products in an epoch in which ‘market forces’ play such a defining role in all our lives?

The Anderton, Dubber and James book is a complement to the work of Rogers because it breaks down what it refers as ‘The Music Industries’ into many of its constituent elements. The book's 10 chapters are further broken down into 80 subsections. Just as a ‘map’, the book offers very much to students of PMS across the range of courses from BTEC to BA. The individual sections say sensible things about often complex aspects of making music products, with a good scattering of brief case study examples throughout. This is a user-friendly book and it will enjoy an extended shelf life. What it isn't, is an analysis of what James attempts to analyse, which is ‘what it means’ that there has been so much change, so much transformation, decline and innovation, within a globally active cultural-industrial sector in such a short period of time.

It is the concentrated nature of change that is at the heart of the extreme difficulty of appraising and analysing music industry, today. How digitisation has impacted music industry is traceable in many (but not all) respects to the ‘empowerment’ of musicians and music users that has followed on enormously powerful (and ceaselessly ongoing) innovation on hardware and software. The archaic ‘feel’ of terms such as ‘home computing’ and ‘The Worldwide Web’ dramatise how remote the early stages of the spread of the Internet to private users now appears. In a world of ubiquitous smartphone and tablet access, the key development for music companies would seem to be how to exist in a world in which music access is expected to be instantaneous and intuitive and in which, consequently, attention is at a premium. In their turn, these profound factors in the experience of music users can be argued to constitute an entirely new music economy. In part, how we understand this new economy can ‘shape’ how we understand music industry, but the point remains that musicians continue to need the value-adding activities of music companies to survive and succeed in such economies, and these come at a price.

What value music companies continue to add to musicians is that they have the ability and means to market and promote their work in economies that are simultaneously virtual and real and global in both incarnations. Both (sets of) authors understand this ability, but neither really goes on to explore its implications: Anderton et al. simply convey that it exists, while Rogers implies that the economic and cultural power of music companies is a factor for continuity despite the intense blur of transformation. Arguably, though, what counts is that music companies retain the upper hand in their dealings with musicians. What this means is that only those products that seem likely to create a profitable return will be supported in the marketplace. Admittedly, the notion of the ‘marketplace’ will also have undergone modification since the beginning of the century (this was the importance of, for example, Anderson's ‘Long Tail’ argument), but in a world in which the freedom of markets is enforced as a catechism, analysts of music industry ignore the logic of market practices at their peril.

To risk an Adornian inflection, what so negatively impacted the major record companies was not so much that they lost control over distribution, but that they lost control over their customers. While musicians go on wanting music companies to give them competitive advantage in the market and music companies go on wanting to profit from the efforts of musicians, music users want what they want on their terms at their price and at their convenience. How we characterise this new reality can then lure us in different directions: are digitally powerful music users now active in an ‘Attention Economy’ (Davenport and Beck Reference Beck and Davenport2001; Lanham 2006) or is this a ‘Pull Economy’ (Bollier, Reference Bollier2006) or can their new sensations, expectations and practices be understood as by-products of ‘Convergence’ (Jenkins 2006)? In whichever characterisation, recorded music retains its relevance because the signifying power of music (and musicians and performances of music) remains undiminished. Because it does, money can be made from music products (whether as recordings, licences or live performances). In turn, because money is still there to be made, then the imperatives of the pursuit of profit are likely to involve the originators of music in some form of subservience to profit routines. Music industry is, then, to be found in the specification of these routines.

Rogers and Anderton et al. are all aware that much change has occurred but, while Rogers asks (and doubts) that such change is defining, Anderton et al. are content to indicate and describe many of the working parts of the changed economy. Both (sets of) authors break down change in useful ways, but, once ‘broken down’, those constituent elements need to be ‘re-built’ as full-on industrial processes. Consequently, what is lacking from both titles is a sense of the politics of music industry, an analysis of it as a process in which new digital practices in the production and use of music goods have been reimagined in ways that still locate them within capitalism, even as competing rhetorics of ‘Do-it-yourself’ and ‘piracy’ continue to obscure ‘what's going on’.