Towards ‘Embedded Non-creative Work’? Administration, digitisation and the recorded music industry

Abstract

For contemporary cultural policy, ‘non-creative’ work continues to form a conceptual blindspot: a foil to define and value creativity against. This paper develops existing categories to augment the task-focused notion of ‘embedded creativity’ with a more situated view of work’s cultural and institutional embedding. It first interrogates this ‘embeddedness’, taking a ‘cultural economy’ approach to intermediation and administrative support. Drawing on observations from an in-depth qualitative study of employees in major record labels, the second part articulates the heightened importance of ‘admin’ to recorded music industries, after ‘digital disruption’. Routine bureaucratic labour presents an atypical example, revealing much about the hidden relational and identity work that goes into constructing ‘creative industries’ as such. The intention is not to show that ‘embedded non-creative workers’ are in fact ‘creative’ but, on the contrary, to articulate the distinct contributions and value of support work in this context, questioning a persistent reliance on creative/non-creative dualisms. Policy research would benefit from enriched understanding of culture's assembly in marketable objects, reorienting understandings of ‘cultural’ labour markets and careers, and reimagining the role of traditional cultural ‘administration’ in the contemporary ‘creative economy’.

Keywords:

• Administration
• cultural intermediaries
• Creative Trident
• digitisation
• embeddedness
• music industries

Notes

1. Pseudonyms are used, preserving anonymity in line with interviewees’ requests; job titles are adjusted but retain a sense of role and seniority.

2. Starting as an entry-level admin, later advancing through promotion to take on aspects of contract manipulation, deal negotiation, client account relations and line management.

3. For instance, majors increasingly offer ‘label services’, fragmenting the administrative, promotional and distribution functions of traditional record deals into smaller piecemeal packages (Homewood 2018); while Spotify’s Will Page (2017) has recently mounted an internal critique of the ‘18 month catalogue “rule”’.

4. The adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software helped major labels manage risk and reduce costs by linking the company directly to suppliers, distributors and customers. See the account given by Dave Cornine, VP of Global Financial Systems for Sony, in a webcast for the ERP service SAP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMBgFyvY8QI. So central is ERP to modern ‘supply chain capitalism’ that, in some accounts (e.g. Rossiter 2016), it is distinguished as the key signifier for globalisation as a whole.

5. Millward Brown and Official Charts Company are market research and sales tracking firms, maintaining various crucial rankings charts. MCPS (part of PRS for Music) and PPL are Collective Management Organisations that administer the payment of royalties to rights owners.

6. A term extending parallels between administrative and domestic workers (cf. Francke and Jardine 2017).

7. The example is informed by reflection on a transitional moment in my earlier employment. The directive was later abandoned.

8. Universal Music Group’s global headcount dropped rapidly from 2007 (8114) to 2012 (6422); after acquiring EMI in 2013 it almost regained its 2007 peak (7649), again since diminishing more steadily (Ingham 2017).