D Hesmondhalgh
Biographic Data
| ID | 4667 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Hesmondhalgh |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Hesmondhalgh |
| SIGNATURE | HESMONDHALGH D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leeds |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5940-9191 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 863 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Revitalising the Concept of the Everyday in Internet Research
In an academic milieu in which a lot of critical attention is dedicated to the data-grabbing, algorithmically biased, and asymmetrical power of massive techno-corporations, this panel explores how a focus on situated ordinary practices can provide us with a more complex, nuanced, and even at times contradictory account of what happens when pervasive digital technologies are experienced in everyday life. It does so via a combination of empirical r…
Caspar Melville
Caspar Melville, academic and journalist, and author of a major book on the Black music cultures of late twentieth century post-colonial London, It’s A London Thing, died in March 2025, aged 58
Living with music in the digital age
Critics of recent developments in music culture have often claimed, or accepted, that ‘functional’ or utilitarian experiences of music (using music to achieve goals such as exercise, relaxation, sleep or work concentration) have become more prevalent as a result of the widespread use of music streaming platforms, and these experiences are often contrasted with more aesthetically-oriented ones. Relatedly, such critics often also claim that streami…
Listening at Home and Beyond
Subjectivity, culture and the datafication of music
The main objective of this article is to critique the notions of subjectivity, identity and selfhood underlying key approaches to the datafication of music, and some key normative positions associated with those approaches. I begin by showing how some of the most sophisticated and influential approaches to datafication of music (by Eric Drott and Robert Prey) draw on theorisation of the harms associated with datafication that depend upon the idea…
What Do Musicians Think of Digital Platforms
Drawing on focus groups conducted with musicians based in England, we discuss how musicians with backgrounds in different genres evaluate the effects of a range of music-related digital platforms on musicians and music culture. Alongside criticisms, some of them familiar from recent public debate and academic research, we identify a number of more ambivalent and even positive perspectives on the platformisation of music. We analyse the divided re…
From P2P to the cloud
Digital Platforms and Infrastructure in the Realm of Culture
The concepts of (digital) platform and (digital) infrastructure have been widely used and discussed in recent media research, and in neighbouring fields such as science and technology studies (STS). Yet there is considerable confusion about these concepts and the relations between them. This article seeks to bring these concepts together more coherently by showing how “platformisation” might be understood in terms of its impacts on information in…
Music streaming platforms and self-releasing musicians
A major development in the music industries in recent years has been the rise of ‘unsigned’ or ‘self-releasing’ musicians (sometimes problematically called ‘DIY musicians’ or ‘independent musicians’) who upload music directly to music streaming platforms (MSPs). This article examines the distinctive way in which Chinese MSPs have sought to incorporate such self-releasing musicians into their platform eco-systems and what it tells us about the way…
The changing shape of the Indian recorded music industry in the age of platformisation
Scholars have explored the impact of technological developments on the livelihoods of musicians before digitalisation and in the contemporary age of music streaming platforms. However, a striking gap exists with respect to the Indian music industries which have been conspicuously ignored by scholarship on cultural work. This article contributes towards addressing this gap. First, we show how platformisation is challenging the longstanding dominat…
Black, Brown and Asian cultural workers, creativity and activism
How do cultural and creative workers respond to racism and the politics of representation and respectability in the digital age? In what ways do they engage in forms of community-building and solidarity-making, while managing pressures to build digital presence and personal brands? This article seeks to address these questions via 30 in-depth interviews with Black, Brown and Asian (BBA) workers in the UK cultural and creative industries (CCIs). F…
Streaming’s Effects on Music Culture
This article identifies five key themes, or sets of criticisms, that have emerged in online commentary on the new musical system centred on streaming platforms, and in related academic research: Streaming encourages ‘functional’ rather than meaningful, aesthetic musical experience. Streaming encourages bland, unchallenging music. Streaming makes musical experience passive and distracted, and music recedes into the background (here the article als…
In(ter)dependence in Platformed Creation
In recent years, a variety of cultural industries have been transformed by platformization – a process in which technology companies serve as intermediaries connecting different parties (most importantly cultural producers and audiences) through websites and applications. From music to book publishing, movie production, and the visual arts, cultural production has undergone massive changes due to platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Go…
Capitalism and the media
This article aims to contribute to the renewal of the way media and culture are viewed under capitalism, by seeking solid normative foundations for critique via various compatible elements: moral economy, well-being understood as flourishing, Sen and Nussbaum's capabilities approach, and culture value. Normative and conceptual issues concerning capitalism, media, and culture have received insufficient attention and moral economy approaches might …
Is music streaming bad for musicians? Problems of evidence and argument
Great controversy has surrounded the growth of the music streaming services that are now central to the music industries internationally. One important set of criticisms concerns the amount of money that music creators receive for the recorded music that is distributed on these services. Many claim that music streaming has made it harder than before for musicians to make a living from music. This article identifies and discusses some significant …
Have Digital Communication Technologies Democratized the Media Industries?
Introduction: some key termsIn media, communication and cultural studies these days, as in much of the rest of life, it's more or less impossible to avoid the term 'digital'.One important question, often raised but rarely explored in depth, is whether digitalization has democratized the media industries and media production.In order to consider this question, we need to seek clarity concerning the main terms.The term media industries refer to tho…
The Cultural Industries
Introduction: Change and Continuity, Power and Creativity PART ONE: ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORKS Theories of Culture, Theories of Cultural Production Cultural Industries in the Twentieth Century: The Key Features Why the Cultural Industries Began to Change in the 1980s PART TWO: POLICY CHANGE Marketization in Telecommunications and Broadcasting Further Changes in Policy: Copyright and the Cult of Creativity PART THREE: CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN THE CULTU…
Sexual violence at live music events
Recent media reporting has highlighted that incidents of sexual violence frequently occur at live music events. Sexual violence has significant impacts on the health of those who experience it, yet little is known of how it impacts on everyday engagements with music, nor what measures venues and promoters might take to prevent and respond to incidents. Through interviews with concert goers, venue managers, promoters and campaigning groups, we inv…
Television device ecologies, prominence and datafication
A key element of the infrastructure of television now consists of various Internet-connected devices, which play an increasingly important role in the distribution, selection and recommendation of content to users. The aim of this article is to locate the emergence of streaming devices within a longer timeframe of television hardware devices and infrastructures, by focusing on the evolution of one crucial category of such devices, television set-…
SoundCloud and Bandcamp as Alternative Music Platforms
We examine two 'producer-oriented' audio distribution platforms, SoundCloud and Bandcamp, which have been important repositories for the hopes of musicians, commentators, and audiences that digital technologies and cultural platforms might promote democratization of the cultural industries, and we compare their achievements and limitations in this respect. We show that the emancipatory elements enshrined in SoundCloud's bottom-up abundance are co…
Television, Quality of Life and the Value of Culture
This chapter foregrounds two concepts that need to be central in discussions about the future of television in the UK: quality of life, and the value of culture. It makes four main claims: (i) television can contribute to quality of life in important ways, but we should not understand that contribution in terms of ‘consumer preferences’; (ii) television's contribution to quality of life should be thought of in terms of what it enables people to d…
What the digitalisation of music tells us about capitalism, culture and the power of the information technology sector
This article examines a striking but under-analysed feature of culture under capitalism, using the example of music: that the main ways in which people gain access to cultural experiences are subject to frequent, radical and disorienting shifts. It has two main aims. The first is to provide a macro-historical, multi-causal explanation of changes in technologies of musical consumption, emphasising the mutual imbrication of the economic interests o…
Indie
This article is Concerned with the complex relations between institutional politics and aesthetics in oppositional forms of popular culture. Indie is a contemporary genre which has its roots in punk's institutional and aesthetic challenge to the popular music industry but which, in the 1990s, has become part of the 'mainstream' of British pop. Case studies of two important 'independents', Creation and One Little Indian, are presented, and the aes…
O fracasso da mídia em representar a classe trabalhadora
O artigo mostra que, embora a Análise da Produção de Mídia (APM) tenha negligenciado, na maioria das vezes, a classe, ela pode ser adaptada produtivamente para explicar as representações inadequadas da classe trabalhadora elaboradas pela mídia, desde que se baseie em: 1) uma compreensão dos fatores político-econômicos e políticos, além dos contextos situacionais, que podem ser observados ou descobertos por meio de entrevistas; 2) uma atenção a co…
Capitalism and the media
This article aims to contribute to the renewal of consideration of media and culture under capitalism, by seeking solid normative foundations for critique via various compatible elements: moral economy, well-being understood as flourishing and Sen and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. Insufficient attention has been paid to normative and conceptual issues concerning capitalism, media and culture. Moral economy approaches might help fill this gap …
Creative Work and Emotional Labour in the Television Industry
In keeping with the focus of this special section, we concentrate initially on some of the problems of autonomist Marxist concepts such as 'immaterial labour', 'affective labour' and 'precarity' for understanding work in the cultural industries. We then briefly review some relevant media theory (John Thompson's notion of mediated quasi-interaction) and some key recent sociological research on cultural labour (especially work by Andrew Ross and La…
Bourdieu, the media and cultural production
This article evaluates Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural production in terms of its effectiveness for understanding contemporary media production. I begin by outlining the main features of Bourdieu’s work on cultural production, with an emphasis on the potential advantages of his historical account over other, competing work. In particular, I stress the importance of his historical account of ‘autonomy’ and of the emphasis on the interconnectedness…
Cultural industries and cultural policy
This article analyses and contextualises a variety of relationships between the cultural industries and cultural policy.A principal aim is to examine policies which are explicitly formulated as cultural (or creative) industries policies.It seeks to address questions such as: what lies behind such policies?How do they relate to other kinds of cultural policy, including those more oriented towards media, communications, arts and heritage?The first …
Looking for work in creative industries policy
In this article, we first outline and account for the utopian description of work in much UK creative industries discourse. We then offer a contrasting assessment that shows how creative workplaces are marked significantly by insecurity, inequality and exploitation (including self‐exploitation). In the third part, we examine recent developments in UK policy discourse, exposing a reluctance to recognize or engage with these manifest problems of cr…
A very complicated version of freedom
Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above
The concept of subculture has been criticised a great deal in recent research on youth and popular music. Two concepts have emerged as offering new ways of conceiving musical collectivities, particularly among young people: scenes, and tribes (or neo-tribes). I offer criticisms of the work of advocates of both terms. I also argue, however, that there is no possibility of a return to the concept of subculture in any adequate sociology of popular m…
The British Dance Music Industry
This article analyses the British dance music industry and assesses claims that it offers a powerful alternative to the 'mainstream' music business. Two unusual features of the sector are identified. Whereas the recording industry as a whole is marked by concentration and centralization, the UK dance music industry is relatively decentralized and is made up of large numbers of 'independent' companies. Reasons for the success of small, local compa…
Towards a critical understanding of music, emotion and self-identity
The article begins by outlining a dominant conception of these relations in sociologically-informed analysis of music, which sees music primarily as a positive resource for active self-making. My argument is that this conception rests on a problematic notion of the self and also on an overly optimistic understanding of music, which implicitly sees music as highly independent of negative social and historical processes. I then attempt to construct…
Post-Punk's attempt to democratise the music industry
Punk's widely accepted status as a watershed in British music-making has produced some fine academic and journalistic studies. Greil Marcus has devoted much of the last twenty years to an assessment of the legacy of punk rock (Marcus 1989, 1993). Dave Laing's One Chord Wonders provides a multi-layered approach which might serve as a model for any analysis of a particular musical–cultural moment (Laing 1985). The most detailed and thorough account…
Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production
This article seeks to develop an approach to cultural production which takes racism seriously. We suggest that there has been a lack of attention to race and ethnicity in the booming research field of cultural production studies, and that the few good studies of race, ethnicity, and cultural production have been somewhat marginalized. Following a section that outlines our understandings of “race” and ethnicity, we outline the development of resea…
Media and cultural policy as public policy
The British Labour government’s media and cultural policies since 1997 are analysed as aspects of public policy. This allows assessment of the media and cultural policies of a supposedly centre-left government in a conjuncture marked by neo-liberalism, globalisation and the continuing growth of the cultural industries. An outline of guiding assumptions about public policy is provided, including the importance of the balance between social forces …
Is music streaming bad for musicians? Problems of evidence and argument
Great controversy has surrounded the growth of the music streaming services that are now central to the music industries internationally. One important set of criticisms concerns the amount of money that music creators receive for the recorded music that is distributed on these services. Many claim that music streaming has made it harder than before for musicians to make a living from music. This article identifies and discusses some significant …
Flexibility, post-Fordism and the music industries
Sex, Gender and Work Segregation in the Cultural Industries
This chapter addresses work 'segregation' by sex in the cultural industries. We outline some of the main forms this takes, according to our observations: the high presence of women in marketing and public relations roles; the high numbers of women in production co-ordination and similar roles; the domination of men of more prestigious creative roles; and the domination by men of technical jobs. We then turn to explanation: what gender dynamics dr…
SoundCloud and Bandcamp as Alternative Music Platforms
We examine two 'producer-oriented' audio distribution platforms, SoundCloud and Bandcamp, which have been important repositories for the hopes of musicians, commentators, and audiences that digital technologies and cultural platforms might promote democratization of the cultural industries, and we compare their achievements and limitations in this respect. We show that the emancipatory elements enshrined in SoundCloud's bottom-up abundance are co…
Capitalism and the media
This article aims to contribute to the renewal of consideration of media and culture under capitalism, by seeking solid normative foundations for critique via various compatible elements: moral economy, well-being understood as flourishing and Sen and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. Insufficient attention has been paid to normative and conceptual issues concerning capitalism, media and culture. Moral economy approaches might help fill this gap …
Audiences and everyday aesthetics
The first part of this article outlines a dilemma in cultural studies and sociology of culture regarding the politics of aesthetics. This concerns whether discourse about the evaluation of symbolic forms serves to reinforce power relations and maintain divisions between people and communities, or whether evaluation can serve as a basis for greater commonality. One way of at least beginning to address this issue is to attend to the 'everyday aesth…
Digital Sampling and Cultural Inequality
This article brings together insights from legal studies with methods of analysis and areas of concern characteristic of media, cultural and music studies. My particular interest here is in how the uses of digital sampling by musicians, and legal practices surrounding these uses, affect how we might think about the issue of cultural ‘borrowing’, especially when white musicians borrow from black ones. This in turn throws light on the relationship …
Were New Labour’s cultural policies neo-liberal
This article assesses the cultural policies of ‘New Labour’, the UK Labour government of 1997–2010. It takes neo-liberalism as its starting point, asking to what extent Labour’s cultural policies can be validly and usefully characterised as neo-liberal. It explores this issue across three dimensions: corporate sponsorship and cuts in public subsidy; the running of public sector cultural institutions as though they were private businesses; and a s…
Unpaid work in the UK television and film industries
This article concerns resistance to unpaid work in the television and film industries. It outlines one notable and successful campaign against unpaid labour which was conducted in the UK television industry and discusses how a similar campaign in the film industry met much greater opposition. It then reports on a survey that was conducted in order to investigate the seeming differences in attitudes in the two industries observed during these camp…
Television device ecologies, prominence and datafication
A key element of the infrastructure of television now consists of various Internet-connected devices, which play an increasingly important role in the distribution, selection and recommendation of content to users. The aim of this article is to locate the emergence of streaming devices within a longer timeframe of television hardware devices and infrastructures, by focusing on the evolution of one crucial category of such devices, television set-…
Regional creative industries policy-making under New Labour
This article analyses creative industries policy in the English regions under New Labour (1997–2010). It examines the ideas behind regional creative industries policies (RCIPs) and their implementation. Focusing on the activities of the English regional development agencies, the primary bodies responsible for the implementation of creative industries policy in the British regions, the article places regional cultural policy during the New Labour …
From P2P to the cloud
Black, Brown and Asian cultural workers, creativity and activism
How do cultural and creative workers respond to racism and the politics of representation and respectability in the digital age? In what ways do they engage in forms of community-building and solidarity-making, while managing pressures to build digital presence and personal brands? This article seeks to address these questions via 30 in-depth interviews with Black, Brown and Asian (BBA) workers in the UK cultural and creative industries (CCIs). F…
Musique, émotion et individualisation
Il existe une constante en sociologie de la musique, selon laquelle cette derniere constitue une ressource positive dans la construction active de soi. Bien que l'auteur reconnaisse que la musique vehicule de nombreuses dimensions positives dans les societes modernes, il s?interroge sur la vision de soi qui sous-tend cette comprehension, et insiste sur l'importance d?une approche critique et historique de la musique, mais aussi sur l'importance d…
Technoprophecy
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Flexibility, post-Fordism and the music industries
IASPM in conference
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Post-Punk's attempt to democratise the music industry
Punk's widely accepted status as a watershed in British music-making has produced some fine academic and journalistic studies. Greil Marcus has devoted much of the last twenty years to an assessment of the legacy of punk rock (Marcus 1989, 1993). Dave Laing's One Chord Wonders provides a multi-layered approach which might serve as a model for any analysis of a particular musical–cultural moment (Laing 1985). The most detailed and thorough account…
Essay review
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The British Dance Music Industry
This article analyses the British dance music industry and assesses claims that it offers a powerful alternative to the 'mainstream' music business. Two unusual features of the sector are identified. Whereas the recording industry as a whole is marked by concentration and centralization, the UK dance music industry is relatively decentralized and is made up of large numbers of 'independent' companies. Reasons for the success of small, local compa…
Indie
This article is concerned with the complex relations between institutional politics and aesthetics in oppositional forms of popular culture. Indie is a contemporary genre which has its roots in punk’s institutional and aesthetic challenge to the popular music industry but which, in the 1990s, has become part of the ‘mainstream’ of British pop. Case studies of two important ‘independents’, Creation and One Little Indian, are presented, and the aes…
Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above
The concept of subculture has been criticised a great deal in recent research on youth and popular music. Two concepts have emerged as offering new ways of conceiving musical collectivities, particularly among young people: scenes, and tribes (or neo-tribes). I offer criticisms of the work of advocates of both terms. I also argue, however, that there is no possibility of a return to the concept of subculture in any adequate sociology of popular m…
Cultural industries and cultural policy
This article analyses and contextualises a variety of relationships between the cultural industries and cultural policy.A principal aim is to examine policies which are explicitly formulated as cultural (or creative) industries policies.It seeks to address questions such as: what lies behind such policies?How do they relate to other kinds of cultural policy, including those more oriented towards media, communications, arts and heritage?The first …
Media and cultural policy as public policy
The British Labour government’s media and cultural policies since 1997 are analysed as aspects of public policy. This allows assessment of the media and cultural policies of a supposedly centre-left government in a conjuncture marked by neo-liberalism, globalisation and the continuing growth of the cultural industries. An outline of guiding assumptions about public policy is provided, including the importance of the balance between social forces …
Digital Sampling and Cultural Inequality
This article brings together insights from legal studies with methods of analysis and areas of concern characteristic of media, cultural and music studies. My particular interest here is in how the uses of digital sampling by musicians, and legal practices surrounding these uses, affect how we might think about the issue of cultural ‘borrowing’, especially when white musicians borrow from black ones. This in turn throws light on the relationship …
Bourdieu, the media and cultural production
This article evaluates Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural production in terms of its effectiveness for understanding contemporary media production. I begin by outlining the main features of Bourdieu’s work on cultural production, with an emphasis on the potential advantages of his historical account over other, competing work. In particular, I stress the importance of his historical account of ‘autonomy’ and of the emphasis on the interconnectedness…
Audiences and everyday aesthetics
The first part of this article outlines a dilemma in cultural studies and sociology of culture regarding the politics of aesthetics. This concerns whether discourse about the evaluation of symbolic forms serves to reinforce power relations and maintain divisions between people and communities, or whether evaluation can serve as a basis for greater commonality. One way of at least beginning to address this issue is to attend to the 'everyday aesth…
Musique, émotion et individualisation
Il existe une constante en sociologie de la musique, selon laquelle cette derniere constitue une ressource positive dans la construction active de soi. Bien que l'auteur reconnaisse que la musique vehicule de nombreuses dimensions positives dans les societes modernes, il s?interroge sur la vision de soi qui sous-tend cette comprehension, et insiste sur l'importance d?une approche critique et historique de la musique, mais aussi sur l'importance d…
Cultural and Creative Industries
My Media Studies
Creative Work and Emotional Labour in the Television Industry
In keeping with the focus of this special section, we concentrate initially on some of the problems of autonomist Marxist concepts such as 'immaterial labour', 'affective labour' and 'precarity' for understanding work in the cultural industries. We then briefly review some relevant media theory (John Thompson's notion of mediated quasi-interaction) and some key recent sociological research on cultural labour (especially work by Andrew Ross and La…
Towards a critical understanding of music, emotion and self-identity
The article begins by outlining a dominant conception of these relations in sociologically-informed analysis of music, which sees music primarily as a positive resource for active self-making. My argument is that this conception rests on a problematic notion of the self and also on an overly optimistic understanding of music, which implicitly sees music as highly independent of negative social and historical processes. I then attempt to construct…
Voicing the Popular
Looking for work in creative industries policy
In this article, we first outline and account for the utopian description of work in much UK creative industries discourse. We then offer a contrasting assessment that shows how creative workplaces are marked significantly by insecurity, inequality and exploitation (including self‐exploitation). In the third part, we examine recent developments in UK policy discourse, exposing a reluctance to recognize or engage with these manifest problems of cr…
Normativity and Social Justice in the Analysis of Creative Labour
There has been a remarkable rise in studies of creative or cultural labour in recent years. Much of this research has emerged from cultural studies. Cultural studies writers have drawn attention to political questions of subjectivity that tend to be neglected in Marxian and other approaches to labour. In doing so, they have drawn, directly and indirectly, on post-structuralist concepts and assumptions. The author discusses these critical cultural…
Russell Keat, Cultural goods and the limits of the market
Russell Keat, Cultural goods and the limits of the market ." International Journal of Cultural Policy, 16(1), pp. 37–38
A very complicated version of freedom
Toward a Political Economy of Labor in the Media Industries
This chapter contains sections titled: Thinking About Work and Organizations Studies of Cultural Production Labor in the Political Economy of Culture Cultural Studies Approaches to Creative Cultural Labor Concluding Comments: Toward an Adequate Normative Conception of Creative Labor References
Is Media Work Good Work?
This chapter examines a politics of creative media work in order to make claims for what is good work. These claims follow a number of recent critiques of work emerging from media production studies. Drawing on sociology, philosophy, and social theory, the chapter develops a model for the analysis of good and bad work in general. A case study of the independent television sector in the UK and Germany then applies this model to illustrate the coex…
Sociology (47 works) · Political science (39 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (31 works) · Law (28 works) · Music History and Culture (21 works) · Politics (19 works) · Economics (18 works) · Art (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Computer Science (15 works)