ABSTRACT
Marketing has come to play a crucial role in the circulation of cultural commodities. It is a complex practice, involving several related activities: research, product planning and design, packaging, publicity and promotion, pricing policy and sales and distribution; it is also closely tied to merchandizing and retailing. Central to the process is product positioning and imbuing cultural products with social significance to make them attractive to consumers. In popular music, this has been concentrated on the marketing of genre styles and stars, which have come to function in a similar manner to brand names, serving to order demand and stabilize sales patterns. I begin this chapter with an examination of the marketing of Bob Marley and the Wailers to illustrate this. The marketing process illustrates the manner in which the music industry
includes a range of people and institutions that ‘stand between’ consumers and the musical text, once it has been produced as a commodity. I use the phrase ‘stand between’ as shorthand for what are complex processes of marketing and consumption at work. The concepts of ‘gatekeepers’ and ‘cultural intermediaries’ have been used to analyse the way in which workers in the cultural industries select, reject and reformulate material for production, broadcast and publication. Based on a filter-flow model of information flow, gatekeepers ‘open the gate’ for some texts and information and close it for others. The gatekeeper concept became critiqued for being too mechanistic and oversimplified and, following the work of Bourdieu (1984) was largely superceded by the more flexible concept of ‘cultural intermediaries’. The sound recording companies have a number of such personnel making the
initial decision about who to record and promote and filtering material at each step of the process involving the recording and marketing of a song. Beyond the record companies are a number of institutions and related practices mediating music, including retail, film, radio, television, the music press, MTV and the internet. These form something of a historical succession; the second part of the chapter takes up the first of them: retail and radio and the manner in which they are linked by the charts.
