Review: Designing the Music Business — Design Culture, Music Video, and Virtual Reality

Review: Designing the Music Business

Guy Morrow's monograph Designing the Music Business: Design Culture, Music Video and Virtual Reality offers a thorough exploration of design, not merely concerning components of the music "product" but extending to the music industry itself and its culture within the digital era.

Rooted in scholarly research and practical experience in artist management, the volume targets two audiences. First, like other titles in Springer's Music Business Research series, it speaks to music business researchers. These readers will develop stronger empirical and conceptual understanding of the diverse and intricate music-related practices and value processes. They will also learn to separate these processes—primarily media elements of design—conceptually while integrating them into a cohesive framework.

Second, the book benefits creative professionals generally, particularly musicians who need or want to collaborate with an expanding network of other creatives to advance their careers without losing sight of available options for shaping their own enterprises. However, this review focuses on researchers rather than practitioners.

The volume is clearly organized and accessible. Early on, Morrow identifies three central questions: Why design culture instead of branding? How does design culture connect with organizational culture in the music industry? How does design culture relate to deal-making? He frames "design culture" through discussions of imagination, creativity, and innovation, demonstrating how his concept enables purposeful integration of music-related activities: "[To] get everything done under the same umbrella" (p. 15).

Chapter 2 details Morrow's research methodologies and his ethical, responsible approach to designing the scientific work. Here he reflects on the book's normative orientation, with "reciprocity" between researcher and participants at its core. Chapter 3 addresses album cover design, arguing that "design culturing" frequently originates with this element. The progression from album covers to vinyl packaging, gig posters, music videos, and finally set and stage design offers a clear understanding of design processes and their expansion into augmented and virtual reality (covered in Chapter 8). Morrow contends that it has become essential to reconsider the status and collaborative modes of everyone involved in creating value in the music economy, including designers and videographers.

Chapter 4 examines gig and tour poster design with many visually striking examples from collaborating visual artists, most notably Jonathan Zawada's contributions spanning art and design. Morrow's findings in this section on the field's intricacy and distinctiveness are particularly sophisticated (see p. 76). This chapter illuminates how the music economy has become increasingly fluid, more creatively diverse and multifaceted than ever, and less like a traditional "industry."

Contrary to expectations from the title, Morrow approaches "designing the music business" less as a challenge for building a more reciprocal future music economy and more as a strategy for avoiding exploitation. The growing complexity is treated not as an opportunity for the future but through older frameworks focusing on continuing exploitation risks. Artists may be trapped between commercial-industrial processes and artistic motivations, with both artists and designers facing exploitation and often self-exploitation. Exhaustion compounds this issue as many practitioners boost output volume to raise revenue when trying to earn a living. Morrow designed the book to confront this problem. He contends that as the industry moves deeper into digital spaces, redesigning the business for the benefit of artists and designers—on whom the industry relies—has become essential (p. 83).

Chapter 5 discusses music video production, revealing that along with contracts and pricing, entirely different "currencies" have grown increasingly significant. "Reputation" emerges as a key currency playing an expanded role globally in virtually networked times. Yet personal relationships have also become more important in the context of opportunities created by major global corporations such as Facebook and Google/YouTube, as Chapter 6 "Music Video Dissemination" explains. In the post-MTV video era, wholly new structures dominate music distribution; Morrow chooses the term "dissemination" over "distribution" to capture associated processes more accurately (p. 123).

As Chapter 7 shows, private and mobile music consumption have changed structurally, while live experiences are increasingly precisely designed across multiple dimensions. Morrow illustrates this instructively, touching on Radiohead's design achievements and tactile, visual, and other experiences involving merchandise. The chapter also presents a fascinating discussion of innovative companies such as Music Glue, which offers a holistic e-commerce solution badly needed by the industry. Chapter 8, "Conclusions: Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality," carries his consistently readable and enlightening design-process examples into the future. While new possibilities emerge clearly, Morrow warns that big technology players like Facebook may harness these opportunities at the expense of the music industry. Yet here, as throughout the book, people play essential roles in design processes that warrant greater visibility and precise description.

Morrow's book fills a long-overdue gap. It provides a valuable contribution by making constitutive and value-generating processes in the music industry more visible and understandable—both for music business researchers and for all creative people operating as artists and "musicpreneurs." The work also holds importance because it addresses inequality in both old and new forms; a future edition could turn this into a more productive topic by engaging with design thinking. Such an approach could do justice to the music business in its role as a future laboratory, which it arguably has been for the broader economy and society through many novel social forms and cycles, including music networks, music cities, and agency-based music festivals. It becomes increasingly clear that those responsible for music activities among growing numbers of small-scale networked participants now need to "design" more transparently, more personally, and above all differently conceptually. Systematic, almost architectural design education for all types of creatives required sustainable momentum concept—introducing service design the book market again innovative perspective understanding practice valuable developing field.