This is an overdue and useful volume; the election of a Labour government in 1997 marks a clear watershed in the relationship between the state and popular music in the United Kingdom, and this study establishes a historical frame of reference through which the nature of this relationship can be evaluated. Further, it cautions that we shall not understand the “music industry” until we realize that this is a misleading umbrella term for distinct music industries; further still, it draws our attention to the complexities of establishing reliable statistics with regard to music-industrial activities (and also to the dissension that accurate methodologies might cause within the ranks of interested policy makers and the music business community, alike). Somehow, though, to conclude that the state has shifted from a benign to a promotional stance with regard to popular music seems too slight a conclusion to derive from the commitment to researching the field evident in the range of the analysis.

The first two chapters of the work are both contextual: chapter 1 charts the interrelations and exchanges between popular music and politics from the 1950s to the present day; the second identifies the convolutions of cultural policy with regard to pop in the same period. However the meat of the work is present in chapters 3–6. In each of these, Martin Cloonan focuses on the rapid rapprochement between the state and the institutional framework of popular music in the United Kingdom after 1997. “Rapprochement” is an appropriate term because, only three years before Labour's electoral victory, the Conservative administration under John Major had passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act that, as a set of extremely wide-ranging and quite draconian measures designed to address the “folk devils” of the period, sought, in passing, to eliminate “raves” as a feature of popular music enjoyment. The actions of the incoming prime minister, Tony Blair, could not have been in greater contrast. As Cloonan demonstrates, “New” Labour (a soubriquet intended to distance the party from its social-reformist past) openly and enthusiastically embraced pop—from hosting a reception at the prime ministerial residence for music industry luminaries within months of being elected to initiating a series of reports into the value of pop to the UK economy and sponsoring a forum in which the needs of musicians and music companies could be brought to the attention of government.

It is in the uncritical identification of the needs of music companies with those of musicians that New Labour's policies with regard to pop can be criticized most strongly, but this is not an identification that Cloonan is willing to probe; rather, he is more concerned to examine the flawed methodologies associated with such reporting—as if, perhaps, better reports would have made for more effective policies. Certainly his identification of the key reports into the value of music to the UK economy makes the work a useful reference point for this era in governmental music policy—where, in turn, his summaries of those reports make a valuable contribution to our understanding of the development of what, in the United Kingdom, has become almost an obsession with creative (rather than the more accurate cultural) industries. The problem, though, is that this approach invites a tendency to stay within the conceptual orbit of the reports and the policy measures informed (at least in part) by them, when what is really called for is a critique of the rapprochement, its assumptions, and the distinct agenda that brought together New Labour and the key institutions of UK popular music—notably, but not solely, British Phonographic Industries (BPI).

The New Deal for Musicians (NDfM) was and remains a workfare device. Its design reflects deep faults in how not only the government understands pop music but, more fundamentally, pop understands itself. There could be argued to be a Machiavellian dimension to the NDfM—massage the figures for youth unemployment by inducing young musical hopefuls into the scheme in which they can be passed off as in training—but even if we temper this rather extreme view of the scheme, what cannot be tempered is the “medicine show” fervor with which New Labour, with Blair as huckster in chief, proselytized the notions of creativity and entrepreneurship.

What key dilemma is faced by advanced capitalism in the West is that its industries are no longer in need of mass workforces. Consequently, and of particular relevance to the Labour Party, there is no longer the opportunity to cleave to commitments to full employment and jobs for life. As a replacement, New Labour came out in favor of an equally feel good commitment to entrepreneurship and creativity—as if these are identical and interchangeable conditions. In this newly pragmatic (rather than stolidly ideological) political project, music businesses, and notably the major record companies represented by the BPI, appear to score effortlessly as simultaneously entrepreneurial and creative businesses, except that the reality of, notably, the record industry for young musicians is that its majority product is failure (and most certainly was in the late 1990s).

Vastly more pop musicians fail to make money and careers than the handful who do—a rough rule of thumb is that nine out of ten acts signed to record companies fail to recoup advances, while only one in twenty sells enough to be awarded a gold disc. Not only did NDfM not confront this reality, it was, and remains, staffed by individuals (and supported by institutions) that do nothing to dispel the old showbiz myth that talent will always out. Consequently, while the reality of popular music production is that its own methods predispose popular musicians to fail, the failure rate is always naturalized as an outcome of the apparent “fact” that there are very few musically talented individuals available at any one time. In its embrace of the “music industry,” New Labour left the flawed and, by the standards of almost all other industrial sectors, hugely inefficient methods of music popularization unchallenged and undisturbed. In turn, embrace by government legitimized this wastefulness and awarded it the twin accolade of entrepreneurial and creative. I doubt that Martin Cloonan wishes this legitimation to be considered “promotional” in the sense that he uses it, but, in some ways, Popular Music and the State in the UK misses its opportunity to mount a critique that would have been of benefit to the people who originate popular music, the musicians themselves most in need of public policy support.