The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy is a fascinating deep dive into the efficacy of popular music policy. From the behaviour of audiences, ownership and streaming to Brexit, creative industries and urban regeneration, it offers a brilliant documentation of the factors affecting policy decisions and the impact of those decisions. I highly recommend this book as an important addition to this area of research and an excellent set text for the study of popular music. -- Mark Pollard, Professor, Composer, and Head of Interactive Composition, University of Melbourne, Australia Interest at both a practical and theoretical level in popular music policy has grown exponentially over the past decade. In the UK, the impact on the music industry of COVID, Brexit, copyright reform and venue closures are now firmly established within mainstream political discourse. This new Bloomsbury Handbook manages to expertly put many of these contemporary debates in context and provides much needed international evidence to support further strategies that practitioners can deploy in this exciting field of study. -- Tom Kiehl, Deputy CEO and Director of Public Affairs at UK Music The fast-moving nature of the contemporary music industries, politics and policy formulation make for an extremely rich but underdeveloped research field. By drawing on a combination of perspectives from around the world, this handbook offers a mixture of history, theorization, typologies and practical examples of policy in action. This means it provides not only the most detailed overview of the field to date, but also sets the agenda for future research. -- John Williamson, Lecturer in Music, University of Glasgow, Scotland, co-author of Players’ Work Time: A History of the British Musicians’ Union, 1893-2013 (2016)