Industry produces culture, culture produces industry One older strand of research ably stressed reciprocal relationships between cultural industries and broader currents of culture within a society. Keith Negus (1999) developed a perspective that claimed that while it was true that ‘an industry produces culture’ it was also the case that ‘culture produces an industry’ (p. 14). 15 For example, this perspective assumed, in Simon Frith’s words (2000: 27), that popular music isn’t the effect of a popular music industry; rather, the music industry is an aspect of popular music culture … [T]he music industry cannot be treated as being somehow apart from the sociology of everyday life – its activities are culturally determined. A cultural studies approach of this kind, then, might involve examining how prevailing patterns of cultural behaviour and power are reflected in the cul- tural industries themselves. The perspective is a sociological one, and there is some overlap here with the sociology of culture work discussed earlier, such as that of Howard Becker. But there is more emphasis than in sociology of culture on questions of power and inequality, especially ethnicity and gen- der. For example, Negus, in his (1992, 1999) studies of the recording industry in the UK and USA, showed how prevailing concepts of gender and ‘race’ in society at large affected the operations of recording-industry companies, and therefore shaped what recordings were made available to the buying public, and how they were marketed.
