ABSTRACT
In 2000, Simon Frith published a short essay in Popular Music . Under the title ‘Music Industry Research: Where Now? Where Next? Notes from Britain’ (MIR) it summarised the findings of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Media Economics and Media Culture (MEMC) programme for which he had been director. The essay was also informed by his digest of five public discussions of those findings, specifically in relation to the music industry. MIR is a typically fertile, typically prismatic work of Frith’s with the MEMC findings first grouped as two ‘general questions’ (p.387) in a way that allows those questions to refract many other ones. Again, typically, because he writes simultaneously both richly and with great economy, summarising Frith’s summary is a considerable challenge but it is a necessary and rewarding effort because the article has no precedent and no true progeny even as the question of what is industrial about music continues to be a central one for popular music studies.
