Approaches towards studying cultural industries and the analysis of their applicability within the reality of modern Russian culture

Abstract

This article features an overview of the common approaches towards studying cultural industries in general and music industries in particular, while describing means of developing “research design” (choosing theoretical perspective, posing research question and selecting methodological toolset), which are currently quite prevalent in culture study and sociology. The author examines the current main trends when it comes to researching cultural industries: the “cultural production perspective”, viewing cultural production as a combination of “creative clusters”, as well as an approach which sees collaborative networks as the primary actors in the cultural industry. The separately examined approaches towards studying cultural production in the music industry are as follows: examining the influence of market structure on consumer behavior, studying collaborative networks in music, studying the political dimension of music production, and finally communication between various levels of decision making within music industries. Also the article analyzes the most commonly used objects for criticism in a variety of theoretical-methodological approaches. The author evaluates the applicability of those methods utilized by sociology for studying musical and cultural production within the Russian music industry: social network analysis, qualitative and quantitative content-analysis, secondary analysis of statistical data, as well as in-depth and expert interview. Also the limitations of using the aforementioned methods when it comes to researching Russia’s musical-cultural industry are demonstrated. The analysis is summed up with a conclusion on these methods being highly applicable in further academic research within the field in question. Given the macro-economic development of the field of producing and consuming music in Russia, together with the complete digitization of these processes, the author assumes that the research of cultural and music industries is a rather promising prospect. The rate at which Russian musical and other cultural industries are currently undergoing transformation lead us to the conclusion that this could be a potentially relevant line of study in the realm of journalism and Academia.