Enterprise and creativity: The British popular music industry 1950-1975

The project assembled a business history of the popular music industry from 1950 to c.1975. Central to this task was an assessment of the competitiveness of the sector and the changing market-shares enjoyed by the dominant British ‘majors’ – EMI, Decca, Philips and Pye. Gourvish and Tennent assembled a data-base to analyse and explain changing concentration levels, based [after Peterson and Berger] on attributing chart success to individual companies. The database is fully explained in an article in Business History, April 2010.

The popular music industry is currently going through a phase of extraordinary change. Driven by the ICT revolution, methods of making and distributing music are in a state of flux. But this change is in fact the second part of a structural shift in the industry. The first involved the switch to a new range of reproduction and distribution technologies; the development of new enterprises and new forms of management and entrepreneurship; and rapidly evolving markets. Lasting from c.1950 to 1975, it saw the emergence and consolidation of the British popular music industry as a major global entity. Understanding the trajectory of the current phase of change clearly necessitates engagement with the development of the first.

This project will provide the first comprehensive scholarly anatomy of enterprises at all levels of the popular music business. At the heart of the sector were a range of actors engaged in entrepreneurial activity, including technical innovators, artists, artists' managers; large record company personnel, independent record company owners; impresarios and agents; owners and managers of venues, media personnel, and retail outlets. The project will yield valuable insights into the generation of markets in the arts, including the central tension between creativity and commercialism.