Abstract
Structural changes in the economy, such as new technological developments that create new conditions for the production and consumption of goods and services, have had a particularly strong impact on the popular music industry. This dissertation explores how musicians, record companies and publishers deal with the control dilemmas that the current environment poses for them. Music corporations face increasing financial pressures and struggle to find the right formulas for qualitative, yet commercial, music. Musicians try to create meaningful lives which involve writing and performing music. At the same time they try to make a decent living. Through an ethnographically inspired field study, the author finds that commercial sociability in the shape of phony friend-making practices emerges as an important control mechanism in music production, and an award-and-list culture operates as a classificatory control mechanism in music consumption. It is suggested that the popular music industry can be characterized by pseudo-Gemeinschaft.