Commercialization and legitimacy in the Field of Popular Music

• In Event: 545 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session.
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 19. Production of Culture I

Abstract

Cultural and organizational scholars have focused on the mechanisms by which a variety of objects, practices, people, and fields attain legitimacy of at least two different types – economic and cultural. Some cultural forms (e.g., soap operas) secure economic legitimacy but do not obtain widespread aesthetic legitimacy (Scardaville 2009), while others (e.g., Hollywood films) acquire both economic and cultural legitimacy (Baumann 2001, 2007). While the production of popular music has long been an economically legitimate activity, I have argued that the increasing amount of newspaper space devoted to popular music relative to classical music is a sign of its ascendant cultural legitimacy as well (Schmutz 2009, Schmutz et al. 2010). Others argue that increased coverage of popular music is less likely an indicator of cultural legitimacy than it is a reflection of the growing commercialization of newspapers and other print media, which value its association with entertainment and celebrity above its position in the cultural hierarchy. The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the degree to which the field of popular music and its cultural intermediaries (i.e., journalists and critics) in four countries tend toward one end of the spectrum or the other and how this changes over time. As such, it represents an assessment of the extent to which popular music has gained cultural legitimacy and also contributes to scholarship that addresses processes of aesthetic legitimation in highly commercialized fields of cultural production.

Author

• Vaughn Schmutz, University of North Carolina-Charlotte