The music industry as workplace: an approach to analysis

In his Preface to Music on Show – Issues of Performance, Simon Frith (1998) compares and contrasts Film Studies as a “much more firmly established research and teaching area than Popular Music Studies.” He goes on to make the point that, in becoming academically established, Film Studies narrowed its focus in two main ways. First, and predominantly, to concentrate on the film as a readable visual narrative at the expense of a consideration of film as, simultaneously, an experience of sound. His second point is that this concentration on film narrative has led to a neglect of research into cinema as an institution. If Frith’s judgement is accurate then, for all the dedicated courses and post-graduate research into film, the notion of film production as cultural work appears under-developed.