Abstract
Design culture can be difficult to explain. My aim in this book is to answer three questions that will help to define it for anyone with a serious interest in the music business and its future. These questions are designed to outline why I use design culture theory rather than other options: Why design culture and not branding? How does design culture relate to organisational culture in the music business? How does design culture relate to deal making in the music business?
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Notes
- 1.
Triple j is a tax-payer funded radio station in Australia that broadcasts nationally. It is a part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and is a youth focused station that has a specific remit to facilitate innovation in contemporary music. It has a key taste making role in the development of new local talent through its ‘unearthed’ platform and international music through its sponsorship of festivals and other live music events in Australia. Its branding policy requires its name to be stylised in lowercase letters (Triple j. 2020).
- 2.
Design culture also includes deal making because it is a context-informed practice (Julier 2006). The collectively held norms of practice in a particular geographical place include deal making. For example, in Chapter 7, the case study of British band Bear’s Den’s live experience design practice shows that if such a band were to tour a country in Europe that tends to have higher production values in its live music venues than other countries on the tour, then the band has to spend more to produce their shows in order to fit into these contexts. Similarly, according to Deserti and Rizzo (2019) and Wilson (2015), the company Apple attributes a heroic role to design with its former Chief Design Officer, California-based Jony Ive, being considered a superstar, whereas Samsung’s equivalent in Korea is comparatively unknown (Deserti and Rizzo 2019, p. 1099).
- 3.
In other words, visual creatives in the music business do not typically have a direct relationship with consumers/audiences (i.e. business to consumer, B2C). They instead provide their services to musicians, bands, record labels, etc. (other businesses) and therefore they most commonly operate in a business-to-business (B2B) secondary market.
- 4.
Designers who create album covers are engaged in what is known as ‘creative labour’. Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) argued that a key critique of creative labour is ‘self-exploitation’, whereby creative labourers ‘become so enamoured with their jobs that they push themselves to the limits of their physical and emotional endurance’ (p. 6). As is evidenced by the example in Chapter 3 of the work of British typographer John Pasche who originally designed The Rolling Stones’ Tongue and Lip image for 50 British pounds (Walker 2008), they are often self-exploiting to produce work for which they are not paid very much.
- 5.
See also Bartmanski and Woodward (2014). Bartmanski and Woodward used insights from material culture studies to explore the question of why the seemingly obsolete medium of vinyl became one of the fastest-growing format in music sales.
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Morrow, G. (2020). Designing the Music Business: Design Culture, Music Video and Virtual Reality. In: Designing the Music Business. Music Business Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48114-8_1
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