This book grew out of many conversations, both among the three of us and many shared with others. They were often conversations in which we tried to pin down what it is we do and how we do it. While these pages formalize the deeper and systematic conversation we’ve shared, we intend it as the continuation of a conversation. We thank those of you who have engaged with us in this conversation, formally and informally, often as our mentors and students, but many also as collaborators and peers.

This precise book developed on the 5th and half floor of North Quad over the past few years. Our conversations were deeply influenced by colleagues Paddy Scannell, Megan Ankerson, Katherine Sender, Sarah Murray, and Yeidy Rivero. Much was also worked out in conversations with students including Jimmy Draper, Annemarie Navar-Gill, Kitior Ngu, and in the space of the Media Studies Research Workshop as well as the multiple iterations of the “Analyzing Media Industries” seminar.

Our uncertainties sent us asking questions of others. Many thanks to Janet Staiger, Joseph Turow, Graham Murdock, Eileen Meehan, Michele Hilmes, and Philip Schlesinger for their assistance in tracing the history of the field. The list of peers and collaborators who helped us to shape our sense of the field is too long to recount, but thanks to C. W. Anderson, Nitin Govil, David Hesmondhalgh, Lee Marshall, Jeremy Morris, John Thompson, and Nikki Usher for assistance with areas outside our central expertise.

Our sincere appreciation to Ramon Lobato for reading an early draft and offering feedback that challenged us to do better. Thanks as well for feedback from Sriram Mohan, Anna Sampson, Michael Wayne, and our most excellent research assistant, Rae Moors. We are also thankful for the considerable support of Polity’s reviewers, and Mary Savigar, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, and the Polity editorial and production team.

And finally, our thanks to our families for cheerfully putting up with phone calls and Skype conversations at odd hours and other absences required to bring this to completion.

“I want to study YouTube as a media industry,” announces a new student. “OK, what kind of study?” There are numerous potential research projects one could design with a focus on YouTube as a major site of media production and circulation. Or, YouTube could serve as a case from which to make broader claims about various sectors and practices of digital media industries and their intricate links with established screen industries in an era of seemingly unfettered global connectivity.

One potential study would focus on the people who make YouTube videos; not just the creators and influencers with millions of followers worldwide, but also the many millions of people who create and circulate videos across an astonishing range of genres. There are many questions that we could pose about their practice. It would also be possible to study the content moderators whose daily, routine work involves scanning hundreds, if not thousands, of videos that have been flagged by automated systems for content review for potential violation of YouTube standards of acceptability. Or, delving a bit deeper, you could focus attention on the engineers who design the content moderation algorithms. You could do interviews, observe them in their roles for a period of time, attend industry events designed for professionals in the digital technology and media industries, and try to understand the broader work culture within which a range of people go about their routines. There are many ways to study any of these groups of media workers and many sound reasons to do so.

While a focus on specific individuals and their roles within YouTube and its specific production culture is valuable, you could also examine YouTube as an organization and explore questions related to its particular strategies as a social media company that circulates videos. Such a study would aim to build knowledge of the broader forces that shape the behavior of social media companies, such as their interactions with advertisers and their policies for dealing with the people who create the content on their services. A study of YouTube as an organization might build knowledge about how social media companies operate generally, but would do so by constructing a detailed understanding of how YouTube’s strategies, practices, and aims lead it to create particular social media capabilities and limit others. It might address how the strategies for YouTube relate to broader activities of parent company Google.

Yet another approach would be a study of the logics of social media industries writ large. This type of study would aim to identify the regulatory, technological, economic, and cultural features of the playing field upon which social media companies operate, how they contribute to the social media experiences users engage, and the cultural relations that result. You could also approach YouTube from a “textual” angle and analyze how a combination of industrial factors may have facilitated an entire range of web series that challenge mainstream media industries’ representations of marginalized and minority communities. Finally, there is also the possibility of adopting a macro-level perspective to examine how YouTube negotiates different regulatory regimes across nations, or how it relies on trade and tax policies to maximize its earnings in an explanation of where it locates its server farms or corporate offices, how it responds to varying regulatory regimes across its multinational reach, and how these practices also shape the social media experiences it makes available and denies its users.

The scenario that we have sketched here of how one might study YouTube as a media industry points to a variety of sites and approaches. Needless to say, any such study would spiral outward to engage with questions and issues to do with media infrastructures, devices, the politics of datafication and algorithmic curation, convergence between digital media companies and established screen industries, exploitative labor practices, state censorship, pirate media networks, and so on. There is enormous variation in the questions that we could pose in any particular domain of a social media company like YouTube. Discerning the right research question is an important part of the process – and actually, the question you aim to answer is likely the strongest guide to the method to use and the scale of the study. Related to that research question, what is the broader scholarly conversation to which you aim to contribute? What are its key dilemmas? Do you think there might be evidence that contradicts the existing thinking? Do you seek to apply existing theory to a new media industry context? Establishing a research question and the conversation you are engaging in is crucial to identifying what method to deploy and the most relevant theories for interpreting findings.

If this is our answer to one seemingly straightforward question from a student, then it may appear well-nigh impossible to compose a Short Introduction to Media Industry Studies in the following pages. By some accounts, media industry studies burst forth around 2009 and rapidly grew into a subfield with a dedicated peer-reviewed scholarly journal, thriving interest groups in multiple scholarly organizations, and was the focus of a filled-to-capacity, standalone international conference in 2018. This Short Introduction explores the formation of media industry studies, as it has tenuously cohered as a subfield in the last decade by teasing apart its long and diverse intellectual past: What theories and methods have scholars in different disciplines and traditions used in their analysis of media industries? What broader social and political forces have drawn scholarly attention to the workings of the media industries at different historical conjunctures? Does the study of media industries take very different forms in different national and cultural contexts? If media industries have always been key sites of analysis for media and communication scholars, why does “media industry studies” cohere in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century? Given the increasing fragmentation of media studies, what are the intellectual and political stakes in naming and legitimizing it as a subfield to media study?

In addressing these and other questions, we identify some of the central questions of this research as well as uninterrogated assumptions. This account does not encompass all types of media industry studies, but explores the questions and methods of those that do so with a particular interest in understanding and examining media industries due to their role in the production and circulation of culture. There are a variety of theoretical traditions and central areas of inquiry within the Media Industry Studies we discuss, and there are also other approaches to studying media industries that are not addressed or incorporated extensively because questions of culture figure less centrally in their inquiry. A Short Introduction obviously does not pretend to offer a complete treatment of the topics and themes it discusses; for this, we hope that readers will turn to the primary sources on which we draw here.

Several other recent books offer insights into the “what, why, and how?” of media industry studies. Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (2009), edited by Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, helped define media industry studies as a coherent but interdisciplinary area of research. Their collection features numerous essays by leading scholars about many of the key questions and concerns that animate media industry studies, as well as various theories and methods scholars use in addressing them. Our Short Introduction takes a similarly wide-ranging approach to defining media industry studies, but offers readers a more synthesized analysis of how different scholars have engaged in media industries research across multiple sites and scales. Understanding Media Industries (2e, 2014) by Timothy Havens and Amanda D. Lotz provides an introduction to the operation of media industries and offers a framework that highlights the interconnected practices within their operation. This text might be helpful for triggering ideas about the range of topics and issues that a media industry study might encompass, but it attends only slightly to the underlying theories and scholarly conversations at the heart of media industry studies. For that, David Hesmondhalgh’s The Cultural Industries (4e, 2019), is an essential read. First published in 2003, The Cultural Industries provided a formative text for many who began their research careers at the start of the century. It expansively details many of the key analytic frameworks and theories and has been extensively updated to keep pace with the new issues developing in an era of social and internet-distributed media. An essay by Havens, Lotz, and Serra Tinic (2009) lays out “critical media industry studies” as a research approach. Now more than a decade old, that essay helped name and provide coherence to the budding subfield shared with Holt and Perren and research about production studies examined in detail in Chapter 3. We take advantage of ten years of research development – and the additional space offered by a book-length examination – to identify how macro-scale research of the political economy upon which media industries operate can be contextually grounded and culturally informed.

In terms of how to do media industry research, Matthew Freeman’s Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Study (2016) and Chris Paterson’s edited collection of essays Advancing Media Production Research (2016) detail many of the research methods that characterize contemporary media industries research, as well as many of the practical and philosophical issues raised by these different methods. Like Freeman, this Short Introduction provides extensive discussion of previous scholarship as a means of sorting through the larger questions and methods pertaining to media industries scholarship. Our book supports its examination of how to do media industry studies by using examples of research and tracing the relationship of methods and research questions by illustration. This book goes into significant historical depth in tracing the growth of media industries research and, just as importantly, examines cases from across many different media industries, while Freeman’s offers practical methodological tips.

Defining Media Industries

Before we assemble and narrativize origin stories for media industry studies, we need to ask what, in the first place, are media industries? Media economists have defined media industries as those sectors that make, manage, and circulate intellectual property (Doyle, 2013), which has led others to consider them as “copyright” industries (Wikström, 2013). The borders of media industries have long been nebulous – sometimes considered part of a larger sector of cultural industries or creative industries that include sport and fashion – though are most commonly explored as discrete entities such as the film, newspaper, television, gaming, or music industries. The development of internet distribution and social media companies over the past two decades has exacerbated our uncertainty about boundaries and defining characteristics of media. For instance, while companies such as Facebook and YouTube manage circulation, they have also begun producing original content. Moreover, they often make intellectual property claims in relation to proprietary algorithmic systems. Many of the concepts and methods developed for studying established media industries are thus helpful for investigating digital media industries as well.

We can also follow the lead of media economists who point to distinctive features of media industries such as high first-copy costs, their status as public goods, and low-to-no marginal costs as characteristics that distinguish this sector from other industries and lead to uncommon industrial tendencies. These features steer media industries towards particular strategies and behaviors unlike a more general array of industries commonly theorized by economic and business literatures. At the same time, media scholars have long argued that the cultural role played by media, despite their status as industrial products, makes it crucial for us to examine their modes of production and circulation (Hall, 1980; du Gay et al., 1997; Hesmondhalgh, 2019). Consequently, the intellectual history and approaches to the study of media industries that we explore here mostly focuses on scholarship that holds together economic, political, and cultural dimensions of media.

Our view is that understanding the emergence of media industry studies, the questions it asks, and the methods it uses, does not require rigid delimitation of acceptable objects of study; the aims of study – of why scholars are compelled to examine the workings of media industries – are more salient. Consequently, we don’t provide a fixed definition of which industries “count” as media industries, and allow that the wide-ranging methodological and conceptual frameworks of media industry study might prove helpful in understanding other industries as well. Indeed, some of the scholarship cited in this book was not likely considered as media industry studies by those doing the research. These cases demonstrate the methodological range of media industries’ research while offering important insights into industry workings. We find that looking beyond one’s home discipline can often be fruitful and, in the case of media industry studies, is often necessary.

In this regard, we take our cue from Nitin Govil (2013) and John Thornton Caldwell (2013), who have urged scholars to reflect on what, in the first place, constitutes an “industry.” Pointing to capitalist media industries’ capacity to narrate stories and develop theories about their own operations, Caldwell argues that we need to be highly reflexive about the object of our research and not fall into the trap of imagining the “industry as a clean, self-evident sphere or as a bounded site for research” (2013, 157). In a similar vein, Govil’s account of the Indian film sector’s struggles to be recognized as a formal “industry” encourages us to look beyond the established media industries and “broaden the range of practices that count as industry” (2013, 176). One of our goals in this book, therefore, is to reflect on how various scholars have defined the contours of an industry, or a particular domain within a given industry, and how their decisions shape research questions, methods, and interpretive frameworks.

What is this Media Industry Studies?

Political economy of communication, cultural studies, sociology, media economics, new film history, and organization and business studies have long been the homes of those scholars who have asked and examined questions about media industries. We don’t seek to supplant any of these intellectual trajectories with what we categorize here as media industry studies. But we do seek to identify and encourage the crosspollination of studies of media industries across these different traditions with their differing intellectual priorities, and believe that demarcating media industry studies might be a helpful way to do so. As evident in the intellectual history of media industry studies that we trace in Chapter 1, scholars identifying their work within traditions of political economy of communication, cultural studies, and new film history were often animated by similar interests and concerns, but the partitioning of academic fields and focus on discrepant media in different fields led these conversations to be more siloed than shared.

We understand media industry studies as a component of the broader field of media studies. Michele Hilmes (2018) defines critical media studies as centered “on the critical analysis of texts – not texts in isolation, but as they are produced by industries and institutions, and received by audiences and societies” (xii). At its core, the media industry studies we articulate are focused on the critical analysis of how individuals, institutions, and industries produce and circulate cultural forms in historically and geographically contextualized ways. We would broaden from Hilmes’s focus on the critical analysis of “texts” to include the routines, norms, and infrastructural conditions in which cultural dynamics are worked out as likewise central to study, and include studies of media making and circulation as cultures in their own right. There are other intellectual traditions for studying media industries, of course, that aren’t driven by concerns about culture. We do acknowledge a few of these here, particularly in cases where they offer tools that can enrich a media studies-style approach to media industries.

As the book’s object of analysis, we understand media industry studies as a big tent that encompasses the research that explores the creation and circulation of media across the spectrum of micro to macro perspectives by identifying and examining industrial practices and analyzing their consequences. It explores the operation of power across and within global and national regimes, business sectors, labor communities, or within media organizations. It adheres to the premise that how media texts are made, promoted, and made available shapes what is made, and that the circulation of bits of culture further infuses them with meaning and significance that is then negotiated through practices of consumption. We do not have a list of topics, approaches, or methods that qualify as media industries, but engage with those whose questions converse with these aims, regardless of whether they study audiovisual, audio, photo, or word-based media. We believe the approaches and methods of media industry studies can encompass media that use analog and digital distribution technologies, as well as the industrial formations of social media. Perhaps the greatest uncertainty comes from the word industry itself, as the increasing availability of the tools of media creation and circulation make it in unclear at what point media become industrialized.

We deliberately draw the boundaries of media industry studies more broadly than is typically done. Much of the work associated with media industry studies of the last decade has taken audiovisual industries as their focus. While such studies are the home for our own work, we argue that focus risks missing insights about media and culture produced by studies that have located a home in sociology, popular music, game, and journalism studies. Instead of drawing boundaries around media forms or asserting an unassailable distinction between the cultural functions of “information” and “entertainment,” we believe studies of all these forms of media are united in the type of media studies that scholars like Hilmes articulate. Of course, the specificity of industrial norms typically requires us to ground studies in a particular industry but, in terms of intellectual context, we imagine media industry studies to encompass a broad range of cultural production because it is the case that, for instance, a study on how a journalist negotiates newsroom practices to get editorial support for a story might have more to offer a study of how directors negotiate ideas to achieve film studio support than has been assumed.

It may be that some disagree about their work being described as media industry studies, although we hope not, and that others find our refusal to draw firm boundaries problematic. Our sense is that the current moment of inquiry and fluctuation in media industry operations warrants synthesis and crosspollination over turf marking and siloed conversations. When the three of us were students in graduate programs in the United States, regular course offerings on media industries were rare. But over the past ten to fifteen years, we have collaborated with many scholars who have played key roles in the development of this subfield. We also find ourselves mentoring several doctoral students whose work comfortably transverses the boundaries we were taught, and we follow their lead toward broadening the subfield further in the years to come.

Chapter 1 expands bits and pieces of a lineage of inquiry that we have discerned, or has been described by our mentors, into a first draft of an account that illustrates a wide range of influences that will certainly be refined in the decades to come. Although this subfield remains nascent, a more detailed topographic map of it can help those trying to place their own inquiries within this expanding and amorphous intellectual terrain. We hope our account sparks conversations that bring even greater detail to the influences shaping the subfield, as such an account could be a book in its own right.

We also seek to identify blind spots and challenges for media industry studies in the coming decades. Where possible, we attend to issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, geography, and other forms of difference that structure and inform the operations of the media industries, as well as those that structure the availability of media and communication technologies. Media industries continually produce and reinforce these and other forms of difference for society at large in the films, television programs, popular music, social media services, journalism, and other media that they create and circulate. Attending to these issues entails reflecting on the relatively marginal influence of critical race theory, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies in informing and shaping conceptual and empirical research agendas in media industry studies so far.

Criteria and Organization

Our goal of synthesizing disparate traditions of media industry studies and a multiplicity of media industries negated a common organization of books such as this that arrange chapters by industry. Chapter 1 builds the case that the study of media industries has a long and diverse intellectual lineage, and uses a chronological account of key scholarship that has explored how media industries produce and circulate texts and the cultural roles and power they encompass. We narrate that story in greater depth and suggest more synthesis than commonly recognized, though confining this account to a single chapter limits its comprehensiveness. Intellectual traditions such as critical theory and political economy of communication provide a deep history of thought regarding the intersection of culture and industry, and more generally of cultural production under the conditions of industrial capitalism. Exploring these traditions of inquiry allows us to trace influences and cross fertilization evident with hindsight. Our aim is not to rigidly or prescriptively delimit the boundaries of a proper approach to the study of media industries or a single intellectual lineage. Rather, we illustrate the influences and the strengths of various traditions and methods that engage centrally in questions of cultural production, as well as some that do so tangentially, but offer tools and insight that can be deployed for cultural analysis.

Chapters 2 through 6 are organized based on what we roughly conceive of as different “levels” of analysis or scales of study, moving in a general way from the micro to the macro. We use this structure in order to organize the variation of media industry studies and intend the levels merely to sort sites of study and explicitly not to suggest any hierarchical relationship. These classifications are messy and imperfect, and the point here is not a precise taxonomy, but to organize a broad array of scholarship that can otherwise seem too disorderly to contemplate. As Lotz and Newcomb (2012, 72) write in the chapter that establishes this heuristic: “The most effective production research will indicate an awareness of the multiple levels and seek to identify the interdependence of the influences, even if focusing upon particular cases, settings, and systems.”

Another way we might understand the levels is as offering different vantage points, in the same way that the surface of the earth appears differently from space, from a jet at 30,000 feet, a helicopter, a tall building, or when one is standing on the ground. Havens, Lotz, and Tinic (2009, 239) used this metaphor to argue for the mid-level approach of critical media industry studies, and we add additional levels of focus through our consideration in this book. As we illustrate throughout, no level is better than the others; rather, different questions can be answered based on the evidence available and relative to the scale of the study. A focus on different “levels” – however loose or overlapping they may appear – enables us to demonstrate connections across different industries and to examine examples from different regions of the world. Ideally, the cases we discuss can serve as inspiration for a range of research projects on new and distinct objects of study.

The levels heuristic guides our criteria for selecting examples in Chapters 2 through 6, followed by the aim of drawing from an array of media industries and of providing an account of more than just Western media industries and scholarship. Our primary focus is to use existing scholarship to tease apart the types of questions media industries scholarship has asked, the methods used to answer those questions, and the claims that can be produced. Individually and collectively we have criticisms of some of the research included here; nor would we claim our own scholarship to be exemplary and without limitation. As a book motivated to encourage contemplation about the craft of media industry scholarship, it aims for readers to identify the inevitable trade-offs related to scope, method, and access, rather than building our account to create some sort of canon. Consequently, we often select studies primarily because they discuss method explicitly, or can be brought into conversation with other research to illuminate a bigger point. We look forward to the comprehensive literature reviews others might write.

Chapter 2 begins with the most micro-level scale, with scholarship that examines people who work in media and their industrial roles. Chapter 3 focuses on research about production cultures and is followed by an investigation of scholarship about organizations in Chapter 4. Research focused on the industry scale organizes Chapter 5 and, finally, Chapter 6 explores macro contexts of national and multinational political economy. These sites of study function almost like stacking dolls in that people make up organizations, organizations make up industries, and the behavior of industries is circumscribed by the political economy in which they operate. Notably, in Chapter 6 we are using the term political economy as distinct from its use in the intellectual history of Chapter 1, as critical political economy and its typical use in media studies. The global political economy – as the organizing topic of Chapter 6 – is the landscape within which all media industries operate. Questions about trade, tariffs, and labor common to this level can be examined through many different approaches, not only those associated with critical political economy. Likewise, a critical political economy approach can be used at any of the other levels of study.

Each chapter explores a range of scholarship characteristic of that level, in order to identify the key questions examined and the assortment of methods deployed in such analysis. Media industry studies use an array of methods and evidence, including industry and government data, archives of media organizations and individuals, trade publications, industry events, interviews, observation and, in some cases, participant observation and long-term ethnographic fieldwork. The aim of this chapter organization is to integrate exploration of what has been studied and learned, alongside how those insights were achieved. We show that particular types of questions and insight correlate with the level of analysis, although similar methods are deployed across every level.

There are many other ways in which we could have organized this book. For example, we could have structured chapters by medium, geographic region, or chronology of scholarship. We opted for “levels” because this organization best allows us to focus on the different types of research questions that media industries scholarship has asked and the ways it has gone about answering them. Moreover, this organizational structure helps us move across contexts and show that theoretical developments that emerge out of a study in Nigeria, for instance, can and should inform scholarship elsewhere. We recognize the problem of building largely on scholarship rooted in the north Atlantic, Anglophone contexts, and instead endeavored to draw connections that transcend national boundaries.

We also very explicitly eschewed a “by industry” approach because if we were to point to a notable weakness of media industry studies, it is that it only engages in multi- or cross-industry examination or conversation on rare occasions (e.g. Curtin, 2007; Elkins, 2019; Herbert, Lotz, and Marshall, 2019; Holt, 2011; Punathambekar, 2013). While the particular dynamics of the music industry are obviously different from that of film, an intellectual enterprise such as media industry studies should aspire to identifying ideas or theories that offer insight to multiple industries. Similarly, we embrace an understanding of media industries that does not bind them to particular distribution technology. Whether albums, cassettes, downloads, or streaming services, the study of music industries – or any other medium – should not be artificially segmented into analog and digital industry versions. Despite initial expectations, much of what were once believed to be “new media” are clearly understandable as written word, audio, or audiovisual media industries that are disrupted and reconfigured by digital technologies. We hope that an organization by level will help reveal which questions the body of media industry studies scholarship has answered, which methodological tools have been particularly useful for such questions, and will inspire scholars to pose new questions and imagine new ways of answering them. Indeed, it is precisely this range of methods and topics that we believe makes media industry studies an exciting and fruitful area of research, and which this Short Introduction seeks to clarify.