ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I aim to critically explore the relationship between popular music and promotion, with two specific aims. The first is to develop a workable definition of popular music promotion through cohering and enhancing what have until this point been piecemeal literatures on the topic. The second is to think in specific terms about how this definition plays itself out across a range of contexts, attending to both the unique and the generalizable issues music presents. As a powerful sector of the entertainment industry, popular music receives extensive promotion throughout the global media system; it is therefore a rich site for coming to terms with the operation, efficacy, and limits of promotion at a time when promotional culture has been receiving an increasing amount of scholarly attention (e.g., Aronczyk and Powers 2010). The complex, multisensory understanding of promotion that popular music demands is also a worthy addition to our scholarly conception of how promotion works.
