Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production
In Working Musicians Timothy D. Taylor offers a behind-the-scenes look at the labor of the mostly unknown composers, music editors, orchestrators, recording engineers, and other workers involved in producing music for films, television, and video games. Drawing on dozens of interviews with music workers in Los Angeles, Taylor explores the nature of their work and how they understand their roles in the entertainment business. Taylor traces how these cultural laborers have adapted to and cope with the conditions of neoliberalism as, over the last decade, their working conditions have become increasingly precarious. Digital technologies have accelerated production timelines and changed how content is delivered, while new pay schemes have emerged that have transformed composers from artists into managers and paymasters. Taylor demonstrates that as bureaucratization and commercialization affect every aspect of media, the composers, musicians, music editors, engineers, and others whose soundtracks excite, inspire, and touch millions face the same structural economic challenges that have transformed American society, concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.
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Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production
In Working Musicians Timothy D. Taylor offers a behind-the-scenes look at the labor of the mostly unknown composers, music editors, orchestrators, recording engineers, and other workers involved in producing music for films, television, and video games. Drawing on dozens of interviews with music workers in Los Angeles, Taylor explores the nature of their work and how they understand their roles in the entertainment business. Taylor traces how these cultural laborers have adapted to and cope with the conditions of neoliberalism as, over the last decade, their working conditions have become increasingly precarious. Digital technologies have accelerated production timelines and changed how content is delivered, while new pay schemes have emerged that have transformed composers from artists into managers and paymasters. Taylor demonstrates that as bureaucratization and commercialization affect every aspect of media, the composers, musicians, music editors, engineers, and others whose soundtracks excite, inspire, and touch millions face the same structural economic challenges that have transformed American society, concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.
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Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production

Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production

by Timothy D Taylor
Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production
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Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production

Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production

by Timothy D Taylor

Overview

In Working Musicians Timothy D. Taylor offers a behind-the-scenes look at the labor of the mostly unknown composers, music editors, orchestrators, recording engineers, and other workers involved in producing music for films, television, and video games. Drawing on dozens of interviews with music workers in Los Angeles, Taylor explores the nature of their work and how they understand their roles in the entertainment business. Taylor traces how these cultural laborers have adapted to and cope with the conditions of neoliberalism as, over the last decade, their working conditions have become increasingly precarious. Digital technologies have accelerated production timelines and changed how content is delivered, while new pay schemes have emerged that have transformed composers from artists into managers and paymasters. Taylor demonstrates that as bureaucratization and commercialization affect every aspect of media, the composers, musicians, music editors, engineers, and others whose soundtracks excite, inspire, and touch millions face the same structural economic challenges that have transformed American society, concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781478019879
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 04/28/2023
Pages: 264
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Timothy D. Taylor is Professor of Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, and Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of many books, including Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, also published by Duke UniversityPress, and Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Working Musicians  1
1. Group Production, the Collective Laborer, Supply Chains, and Fields  19
2. Creativity  48
3. Composers’ Labor  81
4. The Music Supply Chain after the Composer: Adding Value  119
5. Challenges  138
6. It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World  156
7. Neoliberalization as (Self-)Exploitation  177
8. “Thousands of Guys Like Me”  212
Notes  217
References  231
Index  245

What People are Saying About This

Greenwashing Culture - Toby Miller

“This is a wonderful book, written by a leading scholar of the music business who blends theoretical and empirical work on the relationship between professionalism and work for hire in a dynamic and readable way.”

Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid - Louise Meintjes

“Timothy D. Taylor conveys the intricacies of how working musicians in Hollywood learn to manage social, symbolic, and economic practices that sustain, disturb, or (momentarily) undermine the entrenched hierarchies that produce soundtracks. Working Musicians skillfully reveals the gulf between how creative work is meant to proceed and how it actually functions today.”

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