ABSTRACT
The decade of the 1980s has been a time for the expansion of the hybrid enterprise known as the sociology of popular music. Since George Lewis published in Popular Music and Society, the first annotated bibliography on the sociology of popular music in 1979, the theoretical and research scholarship on popular music has increased in both breadth and depth. There are four areas of study within the sociology of popular music that seem to have experienced significant growth in the fourteen years since Lewis's annotated bibliography in the late 1970s. Along with continuing research on the inner workings of the popular music industry, the tensions between art and capitalism and analyses of song lyrics, there has been an increasing amount of work on women in popular music; what Bennett has called small-time or local-level, aspiring artists and performers; roles other than that of performer like radio personnel, and popular music critics; and the content and impact of music videos.
