ABSTRACT
Most academic work in popular culture clusters around three points of the Cultural Diamond—the social world, the cultural object, and the receiver (sometimes referred to synonymously in this text as the audience or the consumer). This leaves the producer point relatively understudied, and given the access problems associated with interviewing gatekeepers, those studies are often theoretical (not data-driven) in nature. Previous chapters attempted to fill in some of the blanks caused by this imbalance by providing interview data with music industry experts (creators, sometimes interchangeably called producers in this book). This chapter addresses the structural, industrial norms at play within the music industry as a way of providing context for how such producers do their work. Certainly, such producers feel pressure from the social world and audiences, but they are also bounded by the norms of their profession, by the imperative to make money, and how those around them have historically done their jobs.
