Popular music and the state in the UK: culture, trade or industry?

In a recent issue of music magazine The Word, a reviewer wrote, “No record with Arts Council sponsorship has any business sounding this good” (Fitzpatrick, 2009, p. 99). The crude underlying assumption is obvious: artistic creativity is compromised or thwarted by the involvement of sponsors, particularly those with links to the state. It is worth contrasting the reviewer’s thinly veiled prejudices with a line from the concluding chapter of this book. “Hopefully this book has clearly demonstrated”, writes Martin Cloonan, “that the days of popular music being considered a purely free market form are over” (p. 141). Popular Music and the State in the UK should be required reading in The Word’s editorial office. It does indeed demonstrate the long-standing connections between the state (and its agencies) and the world of popular music. In unpicking this complex, and important, relationship, Cloonan is by no means uncritical. However, these criticisms are not about whether the state should be involved, but how it should be. Although Cloonan covers much ground in considerable detail, he also recognizes the limits of his relatively short study. There is no attempt to offer comparison between the British case and those of other nation states, nor does he include discussion of broadcasting policy. Nonetheless, he offers much else. While devoting the bulk of the book to the UK’s national and local music policies, he devotes one chapter to the particular case of Scotland, and in doing so provides a brilliant illustration of the ways in which a complex multiplicity of policies and a variety of political agendas impact on the making and consuming of popular music. The chapter on Scotland comes at the end of the book. Before this, Cloonan has traced the wider relationship between politics and popular music, the history of cultural policy in the UK before and after New Labour, and the attempt to map and document the music industry within the wider economy, and to record the emergence of the initiative that was the New Deal for Musicians. The latter was a training scheme intended to help unemployed musicians, aimed at both reducing the jobless figures and supplying the music industry with new talent. At a cost of £3 million, it was, as Cloonan notes, “the biggest direct intervention in popular music witnessed thus far” (p. 103). Running through these stories are a number of themes. A key one is the argument that there is, in fact, no single, monolithic music industry. Rather, there are many industries, covering many different functions and interests. It is not just a matter of production, distribution and retail, but of a panoply of other activities, often organized within relatively small enterprises. The stress on the diverse character of the industry (and the interests it contains) is crucial to Cloonan’s argument. He points to the way in which state perspectives and policies tend to assume a monolith and – more significantly – to develop policy that is more often than not the product of the influence of one particular sector. The “interest” of the music industry becomes the interest of the major producers, marginalizing, among others, the consumer’s interests. Another persisting, but linked, theme is the paucity of reliable data on the industry, so that claims about what is being earned by whom have to be treated with caution. And when Cloonan and his colleagues