ABSTRACT
Corporate strategy aims to control and order the unpredictable social processes and diversity of human behaviours which are condensed into notions of production and consumption and which riddle the music business with uncertainties. These include anxieties about whether existing and new artists will continue to produce and deliver what is anticipated, and questions about whether consumers will purchase their recordings and, if so, for how much longer. At the same time, strategies seek to organize, allocate and account for the equally unpredictable activities of personnel who may spend days within and travelling between different corporate buildings and who conduct their business in a relatively unsupervised manner in studios, theatres, stadiums, clubs, bars and other sites of sound. Hence, strategy provides a way of monitoring and accounting for the activities of producers, artists and recording industry personnel. It also provides a means of rationalizing and ordering the activities of consumers and audiences.
