K Negus
Biographic Data
| ID | 9576 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K Negus |
| GIVEN NAMES | K |
| FAMILY NAME | Negus |
| SIGNATURE | NEGUS K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3408-5551 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 344 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in the Creator Economy: Creativities, Adaptation, Agency, and Trust
Artificial intelligence is ever more integrated into the creator economy, shaping the conditions within which creative work is produced, circulated, valued, and recognised. As AI is incorporated into creative tools, platforms, and cultural production, creators are encountering new opportunities alongside renewed uncertainties about authorship, occupational roles, creativity, and artistic value. Four interrelated themes are introduced as a framewo…
La production du Walkman Sony
From cultural intermediaries to platform adaptors: The transformation of music planning and artist acquisition in the Chinese music industry
Drawing from interviews with staff who sign and work with musicians and songwriters in the Chinese music industry, this article adopts the concepts of ‘cultural intermediary’ and ‘platform adaptor’ to trace a series of transformations since the post-1978 market reforms up to the present day. We argue that significant artistic and cultural shifts have occurred as the creative practices of music planners at record companies are superseded by conten…
Perspectives on cultural economy: Personal, Institutional, Historical
In this short essay, Keith Negus responds to Toby Bennett's request for a personal account of his involvement in the emergence of cultural economy during the 1990s. It brings together reflections on a particular journey into academia, identifies the influence of specific individuals, considers the institutional environment in the UK at the time, and includes observations about the broader political and intellectual context within which cultural e…
Authenticity, Empathy, and the Creative Imagination
This article reviews the changing beliefs about artistic integrity and aesthetic value that feed into judgments of rock authenticity, taking issue with scholarship that reduces authenticity to acts of misguided judgment, myths, conceits, and fakery. It argues that there is no consensus about the meaning of authenticity in rock music, as understandings change according to the varied experiences, perceptions, circumstances, and vocabularies of part…
Postcolonial paths of pop: A suburban psychogeography of George Michael and Wham
This article draws on psychogeography to explore suburban Bushey, Hertfordshire (UK), where the popular music duo Wham! formed and created the foundation for the later career of George Michael. It locates this neglected cultural narrative within the context of parental postcolonial and metropolitan journeys, arguing that migrations from the margins of the British Empire and across London form part of a 'spatial moral order'. Exploring how a disti…
Stages, Platforms, Streams: The Economies and Industries of Live Music after Digitalization
This article contributes to histories of live music since digitalization and provides a corrective to the neglect of liveness in scholarship on streaming and platformization. The study argues that digital corporations and social media platforms are shaping the changing value and experience of live music, introducing new patterns of commodification, as digital technologies are incorporated into a live “experience economy,” and live music integrate…
Eurasian entanglements: Notes Towards a Planetary Perspective of Popular Music Histories
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
East Asian pop music idol production and the emergence of data fandom in China
This article traces the formation of popular music idol industries in China and the emergence of data fandom. It charts the growth of digital platforms and historicizes the commercial and geopolitical itinerations linking cultural production in Japan, South Korea, and China. It locates data fandom as an integral part of the popular music industries reconfigured by digital social media platforms; a structural change from the production-to-consumpt…
Nation-states, transnational corporations and cosmopolitans in the global popular music economy
This article assesses changing debates about globalisation in light of the growth of digital media. It stresses how popular music is shaped by enduring tensions between nation-state attempts to control territorial borders, the power of transnational corporations aiming to operate across these borders and emergent cosmopolitan practices that offer a cultural challenge to these borders. It outlines how popular music is influenced by physical place …
From creator to data: The post-record music industry and the digital conglomerates
This article contributes to research on the changing music industries by identifying three dynamics that underpin the shift towards a post-record music industry. First, it examines how musicians have found themselves redefined as content providers rather than creative producers; a historical change from recorded music as product to content. Second, it focuses on tensions between YouTube and recording artists as symptomatic of disputes about the c…
The sampling continuum: Musical aesthetics and ethics in the age of digital production
This article argues for a view of popular music production that better accounts for sampling than has historically been the case by viewing it as a continuum of activity. Weighing evidence from interviews with musical practitioners against the legal and industry frameworks, we illustrate, first, how sampling has been legally differentiated from other types of musical copying. Secondly we show that, despite this, comparable ethical codes exist wit…
Copying, copyright and originality: Imitation, transformation and popular musicians
With copyright becoming ever more important for business and government, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the practices and values associated with copying in popular music culture and advocates a more critical approach to notions of originality. Drawing from interviews with working musicians, this article challenges the approaches to copying and popular music that pitch corporate notions of piracy against creative sharing b…
Copy Rights: The Politics of Copying and Creativity
This article analyses the politics of copyright and copying. Copyright is an increasingly important driver of the modern economy, but this does not exhaust its significance. It matters, we argue, not just for the distribution of rewards and resources in the creative industries, but as a site within which established political concerns – collective and individual interests and identities – are articulated and negotiated and within which notions of…
Introduction: The Mediations of Music and Alcohol
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
Songwriters and song lyrics: Architecture, Ambiguity and Repetition
This article argues for understanding popular songs and songwriting through the metaphor of architecture, an idea we draw from vernacular terms used by songwriters when comprehending and explaining their own creative practice, and which we deploy in response to those who have called for writing about music to use a non-technical vocabulary and make greater use of metaphor. By architecture we mean those recognisable characteristics of songs that e…
Digital divisions and the changing cultures of the music industries (or, the ironies of the artefact and invisibility)
Digital divisions and the changing cultures of the music industries (or, the ironies of the artefact and invisibility)
Music Genres and Corporate Cultures
Music Genres and Corporate Cultures explores the seemingly haphazard workings of the music industry, tracing the uneasy relationship between economics and culture; `entertainment corporations' and the artists they sign. Keith Negus examines the contrasting strategies of major labels like Sony and Polygram in managing different genres, artists and staff. How do takeovers affect the treatment of artists? Why has Polygram been perceived as too Europ…
Narrative Time and the Popular Song
Drawing from Paul Ricoeur's work on how the uncertainties of temporality are given coherence through narrative, this essay explores how popular songs mediate the human experience of time. It develops this idea via a brief illustrative study of how "Waterloo Sunset" refashions ordinary time through a narrative that celebrates the cyclical repetition of a moment, and suggests a more general tendency for pop songs to humanize the paradoxes of the "t…
Authorship and the Popular Song
Within the broad fields of musicology and music criticism the author as creative originator and authority remains a central figure. Yet sociologists have been sceptical of the emphasis placed on authorship in the arts and humanities, and argued that creativity, art works, and artistic reputations are produced through social processes and struggles. Meanwhile, a strand of cultural theory has followed Barthes’s pronouncement of ‘the death of the au…
Bob Dylan's phonographic imagination
In this article I emphasise the deliberate and reflexive way that Bob Dylan has approached studio recording, sketching the features of a phonographic aesthetic, to highlight a neglected aspect of Dylan's creative practice and to counter the view of Dylan as primarily a 'performing artist', one who approaches the studio in a casual manner as a place to cut relatively spontaneous drafts of songs that are later developed on stage. Drawing on Evan Ei…
Musicians on Television: Visible, Audible and Ignored
This article focuses on the prominent anxieties generated by television broadcasts of musicians from the 1930s onwards. It explores three specific issues: first, a concern that television images of performing musicians are detrimental to the experience of music; second, negative judgments about the consequences of television sound quality; and, third, fears that musical value is undermined by the distracted character of television reception. Focu…
Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value
Identities and Industries: The Cultural Formation of Aesthetic Economies
Belonging and detachment
The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance Between Production and Consumption
This article raises some critical questions about cultural intermediaries as both a descriptive label and analytic concept. In doing so, it has two main aims. First, it seeks to provide some clarification, critique and suggestions that will assist in the elaboration of this idea and offer possible lines of enquiry for further research. Second, it is argued that whilst studying the work of cultural intermediaries can provide a number of insights, …
East Asian pop music idol production and the emergence of data fandom in China
This article traces the formation of popular music idol industries in China and the emergence of data fandom. It charts the growth of digital platforms and historicizes the commercial and geopolitical itinerations linking cultural production in Japan, South Korea, and China. It locates data fandom as an integral part of the popular music industries reconfigured by digital social media platforms; a structural change from the production-to-consumpt…
Cultural production and the corporation: Musical genres and the strategic management of creativity in the US recording industry
This article focuses on how the major US recording companies attempt to strategically manage their different genres of music. It then considers the consequences of this for creative and commercial practices through illustrative case studies of the corporate management of rap and salsa. In broad terms, the article is intended as a contribution to debates about the `culture industry' and the interrelations between `culture' and `economics'. Two the…
Belonging and detachment
Where the Mystical Meets the Market: Creativity and Commerce in the Production of Popular Music
Taking as my theme the familiar opposition between commerce and creativity, this paper contrasts different sociological approaches to the production of popular music and questions some of the assumptions about the rational nature of the market and mystical character of creative inspiration, that are often implied when these terms - 'creativity' and 'commerce' - are used in this binary oppositional manner. In arguing for a sociology of the mundane…
Stages, Platforms, Streams: The Economies and Industries of Live Music after Digitalization
This article contributes to histories of live music since digitalization and provides a corrective to the neglect of liveness in scholarship on streaming and platformization. The study argues that digital corporations and social media platforms are shaping the changing value and experience of live music, introducing new patterns of commodification, as digital technologies are incorporated into a live “experience economy,” and live music integrate…
From creator to data: The post-record music industry and the digital conglomerates
This article contributes to research on the changing music industries by identifying three dynamics that underpin the shift towards a post-record music industry. First, it examines how musicians have found themselves redefined as content providers rather than creative producers; a historical change from recorded music as product to content. Second, it focuses on tensions between YouTube and recording artists as symptomatic of disputes about the c…
Plugging and programming: Pop radio and record promotion in Britain and the United States
The radio networks of North America and Britain provide one of the most important promotional outlets for recorded music, setting programming agendas at radio stations and influencing the talent acquisition policies of record labels throughout the world. For many years there have been sharp contrasts in the way in which music radio has operated and been organised in these two countries. The promotion of records in Britain has mainly been directed…
The Changing Sites of Sound: Music Retailing and the Composition of Consumers
Creativity and cultural production
(2000). Creativity and cultural production. International Journal of Cultural Policy: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 259-282
Authorship and the Popular Song
Within the broad fields of musicology and music criticism the author as creative originator and authority remains a central figure. Yet sociologists have been sceptical of the emphasis placed on authorship in the arts and humanities, and argued that creativity, art works, and artistic reputations are produced through social processes and struggles. Meanwhile, a strand of cultural theory has followed Barthes’s pronouncement of ‘the death of the au…
Global Harmonies and Local Discords: Transnational Policies and Practices in the European Recording Industry
This article focuses on processes of globalization in the music industry by examining the transnational practices of the major record companies in Europe. Outlining various pan-European repertoire policies and working arrangements, it describes how tensions arise between staff in different national divisions of record companies; over the unequal exchange of musical products and due to the way in which locally produced music is deprioritized in fa…
From cultural intermediaries to platform adaptors: The transformation of music planning and artist acquisition in the Chinese music industry
Drawing from interviews with staff who sign and work with musicians and songwriters in the Chinese music industry, this article adopts the concepts of ‘cultural intermediary’ and ‘platform adaptor’ to trace a series of transformations since the post-1978 market reforms up to the present day. We argue that significant artistic and cultural shifts have occurred as the creative practices of music planners at record companies are superseded by conten…
Introduction to 'Music and Television' special issue
Television has been conspicuously neglected in studies of popular music, and music has been notably absent from most accounts of television. The thought that this neglect might be significant was taken as the starting point for this special edition of the journal. Unlike some subjects (such as popular music and gender/sexuality, for example), where it is readily apparent that a number of people are busily pursuing research and where there is a hi…
Songwriters and song lyrics: Architecture, Ambiguity and Repetition
This article argues for understanding popular songs and songwriting through the metaphor of architecture, an idea we draw from vernacular terms used by songwriters when comprehending and explaining their own creative practice, and which we deploy in response to those who have called for writing about music to use a non-technical vocabulary and make greater use of metaphor. By architecture we mean those recognisable characteristics of songs that e…
Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman
What does the Walkman have to do with the 21st century? The long-awaited second edition of this classic textbook takes students on a journey between past and present, giving them the skills do to cultural analysis along the way. Through the notion of the 'circuit of culture', this book teaches students to critically examine what culture means, and how and why it is enmeshed with the media texts and objects in their lives. Students will: - gain pr…
Copying, copyright and originality: Imitation, transformation and popular musicians
With copyright becoming ever more important for business and government, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the practices and values associated with copying in popular music culture and advocates a more critical approach to notions of originality. Drawing from interviews with working musicians, this article challenges the approaches to copying and popular music that pitch corporate notions of piracy against creative sharing b…
Narrative Time and the Popular Song
Drawing from Paul Ricoeur's work on how the uncertainties of temporality are given coherence through narrative, this essay explores how popular songs mediate the human experience of time. It develops this idea via a brief illustrative study of how "Waterloo Sunset" refashions ordinary time through a narrative that celebrates the cyclical repetition of a moment, and suggests a more general tendency for pop songs to humanize the paradoxes of the "t…
Bob Dylan's phonographic imagination
In this article I emphasise the deliberate and reflexive way that Bob Dylan has approached studio recording, sketching the features of a phonographic aesthetic, to highlight a neglected aspect of Dylan's creative practice and to counter the view of Dylan as primarily a 'performing artist', one who approaches the studio in a casual manner as a place to cut relatively spontaneous drafts of songs that are later developed on stage. Drawing on Evan Ei…
La production du Walkman Sony
Perspectives on cultural economy: Personal, Institutional, Historical
In this short essay, Keith Negus responds to Toby Bennett's request for a personal account of his involvement in the emergence of cultural economy during the 1990s. It brings together reflections on a particular journey into academia, identifies the influence of specific individuals, considers the institutional environment in the UK at the time, and includes observations about the broader political and intellectual context within which cultural e…
Postcolonial paths of pop: A suburban psychogeography of George Michael and Wham
This article draws on psychogeography to explore suburban Bushey, Hertfordshire (UK), where the popular music duo Wham! formed and created the foundation for the later career of George Michael. It locates this neglected cultural narrative within the context of parental postcolonial and metropolitan journeys, arguing that migrations from the margins of the British Empire and across London form part of a 'spatial moral order'. Exploring how a disti…
Digital divisions and the changing cultures of the music industries (or, the ironies of the artefact and invisibility)
Digital divisions and the changing cultures of the music industries (or, the ironies of the artefact and invisibility)
Musicians on Television: Visible, Audible and Ignored
This article focuses on the prominent anxieties generated by television broadcasts of musicians from the 1930s onwards. It explores three specific issues: first, a concern that television images of performing musicians are detrimental to the experience of music; second, negative judgments about the consequences of television sound quality; and, third, fears that musical value is undermined by the distracted character of television reception. Focu…
Popular Music and Social Reality', International Association for the Study of Popular Music
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
Global Harmonies and Local Discords: Transnational Policies and Practices in the European Recording Industry
This article focuses on processes of globalization in the music industry by examining the transnational practices of the major record companies in Europe. Outlining various pan-European repertoire policies and working arrangements, it describes how tensions arise between staff in different national divisions of record companies; over the unequal exchange of musical products and due to the way in which locally produced music is deprioritized in fa…
Plugging and programming: Pop radio and record promotion in Britain and the United States
The radio networks of North America and Britain provide one of the most important promotional outlets for recorded music, setting programming agendas at radio stations and influencing the talent acquisition policies of record labels throughout the world. For many years there have been sharp contrasts in the way in which music radio has operated and been organised in these two countries. The promotion of records in Britain has mainly been directed…
The Changing Sites of Sound: Music Retailing and the Composition of Consumers
Where the Mystical Meets the Market: Creativity and Commerce in the Production of Popular Music
Taking as my theme the familiar opposition between commerce and creativity, this paper contrasts different sociological approaches to the production of popular music and questions some of the assumptions about the rational nature of the market and mystical character of creative inspiration, that are often implied when these terms - 'creativity' and 'commerce' - are used in this binary oppositional manner. In arguing for a sociology of the mundane…
Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman
What does the Walkman have to do with the 21st century? The long-awaited second edition of this classic textbook takes students on a journey between past and present, giving them the skills do to cultural analysis along the way. Through the notion of the 'circuit of culture', this book teaches students to critically examine what culture means, and how and why it is enmeshed with the media texts and objects in their lives. Students will: - gain pr…
Cultural production and the corporation: Musical genres and the strategic management of creativity in the US recording industry
This article focuses on how the major US recording companies attempt to strategically manage their different genres of music. It then considers the consequences of this for creative and commercial practices through illustrative case studies of the corporate management of rap and salsa. In broad terms, the article is intended as a contribution to debates about the `culture industry' and the interrelations between `culture' and `economics'. Two the…
The Music Business and Rap: Between the Street and the Executive Suite
This article focuses on the organizational practices of the music industry to contribute a neglected dimension to our understanding of rap as a commercial activity and cultural form. It initially situates the production of rap within the context of the corporate strategies and business practices of musical entertainment companies, stressing how rap production is located within the context of corporate 'black music divisions' and the major labels'…
Creativity and cultural production
(2000). Creativity and cultural production. International Journal of Cultural Policy: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 259-282
Identities and Industries: The Cultural Formation of Aesthetic Economies
Belonging and detachment
Introduction to 'Music and Television' special issue
Television has been conspicuously neglected in studies of popular music, and music has been notably absent from most accounts of television. The thought that this neglect might be significant was taken as the starting point for this special edition of the journal. Unlike some subjects (such as popular music and gender/sexuality, for example), where it is readily apparent that a number of people are busily pursuing research and where there is a hi…
The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance Between Production and Consumption
This article raises some critical questions about cultural intermediaries as both a descriptive label and analytic concept. In doing so, it has two main aims. First, it seeks to provide some clarification, critique and suggestions that will assist in the elaboration of this idea and offer possible lines of enquiry for further research. Second, it is argued that whilst studying the work of cultural intermediaries can provide a number of insights, …
Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value
Musicians on Television: Visible, Audible and Ignored
This article focuses on the prominent anxieties generated by television broadcasts of musicians from the 1930s onwards. It explores three specific issues: first, a concern that television images of performing musicians are detrimental to the experience of music; second, negative judgments about the consequences of television sound quality; and, third, fears that musical value is undermined by the distracted character of television reception. Focu…
Bob Dylan's phonographic imagination
In this article I emphasise the deliberate and reflexive way that Bob Dylan has approached studio recording, sketching the features of a phonographic aesthetic, to highlight a neglected aspect of Dylan's creative practice and to counter the view of Dylan as primarily a 'performing artist', one who approaches the studio in a casual manner as a place to cut relatively spontaneous drafts of songs that are later developed on stage. Drawing on Evan Ei…
Authorship and the Popular Song
Within the broad fields of musicology and music criticism the author as creative originator and authority remains a central figure. Yet sociologists have been sceptical of the emphasis placed on authorship in the arts and humanities, and argued that creativity, art works, and artistic reputations are produced through social processes and struggles. Meanwhile, a strand of cultural theory has followed Barthes’s pronouncement of ‘the death of the au…
Narrative Time and the Popular Song
Drawing from Paul Ricoeur's work on how the uncertainties of temporality are given coherence through narrative, this essay explores how popular songs mediate the human experience of time. It develops this idea via a brief illustrative study of how "Waterloo Sunset" refashions ordinary time through a narrative that celebrates the cyclical repetition of a moment, and suggests a more general tendency for pop songs to humanize the paradoxes of the "t…
Music Genres and Corporate Cultures
Music Genres and Corporate Cultures explores the seemingly haphazard workings of the music industry, tracing the uneasy relationship between economics and culture; `entertainment corporations' and the artists they sign. Keith Negus examines the contrasting strategies of major labels like Sony and Polygram in managing different genres, artists and staff. How do takeovers affect the treatment of artists? Why has Polygram been perceived as too Europ…
Songwriters and song lyrics: Architecture, Ambiguity and Repetition
This article argues for understanding popular songs and songwriting through the metaphor of architecture, an idea we draw from vernacular terms used by songwriters when comprehending and explaining their own creative practice, and which we deploy in response to those who have called for writing about music to use a non-technical vocabulary and make greater use of metaphor. By architecture we mean those recognisable characteristics of songs that e…
Digital divisions and the changing cultures of the music industries (or, the ironies of the artefact and invisibility)
Digital divisions and the changing cultures of the music industries (or, the ironies of the artefact and invisibility)
Introduction: The Mediations of Music and Alcohol
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 sampling continuum: Musical aesthetics and ethics in the age of digital production
This article argues for a view of popular music production that better accounts for sampling than has historically been the case by viewing it as a continuum of activity. Weighing evidence from interviews with musical practitioners against the legal and industry frameworks, we illustrate, first, how sampling has been legally differentiated from other types of musical copying. Secondly we show that, despite this, comparable ethical codes exist wit…
Copying, copyright and originality: Imitation, transformation and popular musicians
With copyright becoming ever more important for business and government, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the practices and values associated with copying in popular music culture and advocates a more critical approach to notions of originality. Drawing from interviews with working musicians, this article challenges the approaches to copying and popular music that pitch corporate notions of piracy against creative sharing b…
Copy Rights: The Politics of Copying and Creativity
This article analyses the politics of copyright and copying. Copyright is an increasingly important driver of the modern economy, but this does not exhaust its significance. It matters, we argue, not just for the distribution of rewards and resources in the creative industries, but as a site within which established political concerns – collective and individual interests and identities – are articulated and negotiated and within which notions of…
Sociology (24 works) · Art (22 works) · Music History and Culture (22 works) · Visual arts (20 works) · Law (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (13 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Creativity (10 works)