In spring 2011, Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, and Emma Webster co-organized a conference held at the University of Edinburgh on “The Business of Live Music.” A culminating event in the research team’s Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project to study live music promotion in the United Kingdom, “The Business of Live Music” conference was to my knowledge the first academic conference wholly devoted to the study of live music. The majority of participants were from British universities, but there were also presenters from the United States, Canada, Australia, and continental Europe. For me, and no doubt for many of the other attendees, it felt like the conference announced the existence of a field that had previously lacked the visibility or coherence to be recognized. The conference focus on the business of live music reflected the primary interest of the organizers in live music promotion, a focus that directed attention far more on the backstage or behind-the-scenes aspects of concert production than on what occurs on the stage. This was not a conference at which performance studies was of paramount concern. Rather, most of the presentations considered fundamental questions such as: How are live music events produced and promoted? Where does live music fit into larger policy debates about arts and culture? How is live music tied to local scenes and networks, or to the experience of place? And what is the role of live music within the larger music industry economy?Ten years hence, studies of live music have proliferated. Like other highly specialized fields, though—metal studies comes to mind—much of the conversation that characterizes live music scholarship has remained internally focused. Articles beget more articles, conferences and edited collections seek to impose more coherence upon the still-emerging field, but live music studies has a ways to go before it achieves the salience of, say, sound studies, a specialized field that has exerted a transformative effect upon a range of disciplines. A recent book—or three, depending on how you count them—may be poised to heighten the impact of live music studies on the broader range of music-based humanities and social science research. The three volumes of Frith, Brennan, Cloonan, and Webster’s The History of Live Music in Britain project—the third and last of which came out in April 2021, fittingly almost exactly ten years after the “Business of Live Music” conference—mark what is undoubtedly the most ambitious exercise in the scholarly study of live music to date. Considered as a whole, the work indicates some of the promise of live music as a subject of inquiry, intervening in a diverse range of fields and proposing crucial new questions that are germane not only to other live music scholars, but also to the broader field of popular music studies.Whether the study of live music should constitute a field unto itself is no idle question. Hyper-specialization is one of the defining features of the neoliberal academy, and as it becomes more entrenched, it grows less likely for scholars working in one area to produce work that has the breadth to be relevant to those working in other fields. Already within live music research, specializations have begun to split off into their own narrower spheres. Music festival studies especially has assumed a momentum all its own, and indeed may prove to have more salience as a field than live music studies writ large.1 British architectural historian Robert Kronenburg has carved out a specialization in the study of live music venues.2 A number of emerging scholars have begun to focus on live sound engineering and production, with John Kane’s extensive study of pioneering sound engineer Bill Hanley leading the way.3 In a sense, this range of activity is a sign of the potential viability of live music studies as a field, demonstrating some of the avenues that bear fruitful inquiry. From another perspective, though, it may suggest the extent to which research on live music, like any field in the making, can constitute a sort of rabbit hole, sequestering rather than engendering dialogue as scholars burrow deeper into their respective warrens.The History of Live Music in Britain stands apart from this trend by drawing together so many strands of live music inquiry. Although it is a highly specialized project, it is also a work of synthesis, treating its subject with a wide-angle approach. Frith et al., in the preface to the first volume of their study (2013), outline three principal rationales for organizing such a large-scale project around the subject of live music. First and most substantially, they assert—rightly, I believe—that analysis of the music industry too often privileges sound recordings and treats live music as secondary if it is given any consideration at all. Supplementing this claim, they suggest that a focus on live music directs attention toward the importance of place, especially evident in the key role played by music venues, and offers a distinct opportunity to explore the relationship between music and the state, which they claim to be more direct in the live music realm than in recorded music (ix). This latter point bespeaks their focus upon a national context in which state support for music and the arts exists at a substantial level, as compared with the U.S. where such support is decidedly lacking except in certain delimited spheres. Indeed, when I attended “The Business of Live Music” conference, I was struck by how much of the work presented there concerned questions of local and national policy, and even more so by the assumption that scholars researching live music could influence policy decisions—something that seems a more remote prospect in the U.S. context. This issue suggests that more comparative work is needed to grasp how economies of live music vary according to the extent to which they are wholly privatized or treated as something of broader public concern.The chronological sweep of The History of Live Music in Britain encompasses a range of major transformations in the musical culture of Great Britain and in the shape of the live music business. Beginning their study in 1950, Frith et al. take the post-World War II period of rebuilding social and economic stability as their starting point. Rock and roll comes into focus as a major preoccupation in the first volume, and the transition from rock and roll to “rock” has much to do with the decision to end volume one in 1967 and start volume two in 1968. While one might quibble about the rock-centric nature of this approach to periodization, taken as a whole, the three volumes of The History of Live Music in Britain are notable for the heterogeneity of musical material covered. Indeed, beginning the work in 1950 has the effect of decentering rock and roll from the narrative as much as it serves to make the music central. A pivotal insight comes in a chapter devoted to the work of being a musician in the 1950s and early 1960s. There, the authors outline a series of ways in which examining popular music history through live music rather than through recordings makes a difference. Live music, they claim, “makes clear that changes in musical taste and performing practice are more gradual and complex than is suggested by comparing lists of bestselling records.” It further reveals that careers of musicians encompass far more than the period during which they may have a hit record; and in a correlative point, to focus on live music is to see how adaptable professional musicians have tended to be, ready to shift stylistic or genre allegiance to make a living. Extrapolating from these assertions, the authors posit: “From a live music perspective, then, it is problematic to describe the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll in Britain in the mid-1950s as ‘revolutionary,’ as marking a definitive change of musical generations. Rather, it took its place amidst a plethora of other musical entertainments” (2013, 62–63). Here, the historiographic significance of Frith et al.’s work comes to the foreground, and the multi-perspectival lens through which they view musical labor informs the project throughout the three volumes.While the authors integrate a variety of genre histories—folk, jazz, skiffle, rock, classical, soul, disco, jungle, and grime, to name a few—genre is not the primary rubric through which The History of Live Music in Britain is organized. Instead, the project revolves more squarely around the predominant modes of live music promotion, production and presentation, paying close attention to the changing touring patterns of British musicians, the distinct sorts of venues that emerged as the live music economy evolved over time, the career paths followed by those who worked in live music promotion, the interrelationships that existed between live music and other forms of musical media, and the aforementioned connections between live music and the state. The primary innovation of The History of Live Music in Britain is that, to a greater degree than any previous study, it demonstrates that live music has a history that can be treated as a discrete subject in its own right. This is not to suggest that the history of live music has gone entirely undocumented until now. Many works exist that offer partial renderings of this history, whether focused on classical music concerts, jazz clubs, rock festivals, or disco nightlife. Yet nearly all such previous work has ultimately been more about genre history than about live music per se. Studies of jazz clubs are principally exercises in jazz history; studies of classical music concerts are mainly about the institutionalization of cultural norms associated with Western art music. Frith et al. have begun the work of putting these narratives together and thinking holistically about how live music matters to musical life broadly conceived.From this perspective, The History of Live Music in Britain tracks a trajectory from the fairly modest and relatively disorganized state of the live music business in the 1950s and early 1960s into the period when music festivals signal the rise of a new economy of scale, which then becomes further institutionalized via the corporate consolidation signaled by the mounting influence of Live Nation as a global live music producer. In the first volume, two parallel developments set the terms for the way that live music would evolve. The 1946 establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain creates a new platform for state support of the arts, but in its early manifestation upholds existing patterns whereby priority is given to professional classical music organizations (2013, 48). Promotion of more amateur types of music making, or of popular musical styles, is left to the commercial market where a strong do-it-yourself impulse takes hold both in approaches to making music and in methods of promoting live shows. Small clubs and coffeehouses are the primary drivers of change during this period, their influence attached to young music fans whose tastes begin to command new attention. A preference for informality among this youth audience led to a shift from the traditional dance halls and ballrooms to clubs as the primary scene for dancing, while performances across genres from jazz to folk to skiffle to early rock and roll were marked by a new intimacy between performer and fan. Skiffle especially gave rise to a revised understanding of what it meant to see live music. As the authors assert: “For young audiences, in particular, a good night out came to mean dancing to loud music—on stage and on disc—in a club” (104). Just as importantly, these seemingly casual spaces drew the attention of managers, agents, and record industry talent scouts, affording a novel path toward a career in music that redrew the boundary between professional and amateur (109).When amplification became more ubiquitous with the rise of the British “beat music” boom of the early 1960s, the shape of things to come had duly arrived. Yet the British touring circuit of this period did not keep pace with the concurrent growth of the live music market in the U.S. (192). The promoters who helped usher in the next phase of development in British live music included figures such as Harvey Goldsmith, who began promoting concerts as a student at Brighton College of Technology and then dove into the emerging psychedelic rock scene of the late 1960s while forging alliances with U.S. promoters such as Bill Graham. Volume two of Frith et al.’s history opens with the world that Goldsmith and his peers had wrought, wherein the rock economy began to generate enormous revenues. A key move made by the authors, and one that is telling of their methodology, is that they define rock less as a genre and more as “an economic model, an approach to the organization of music moneymaking in which album selling provided the central dynamic” (2019, 6). In what the authors call the “age of rock,” live music becomes subsidiary to selling records arguably for the first time, such that concert tours become organized around album releases, and record corporations provide substantial amounts of financial capital for touring expenses. This inversion of the previous music business model has far-reaching implications and can be seen as the basis for the common tendency in popular music scholarship to conflate the music industry with the recording industry. One might even say that this tendency betrayed the not-so-hidden rockism of popular music studies that had held sway until quite recently.Another characteristic move made by the authors in volume two is that the opening chapter on “The Age of Rock” is immediately followed by a short chapter on classical music, where record company support was far less available and private corporate sponsorships became increasingly commonplace. A subsequent chapter on the shifting value of small club venues tracks a general change from youth to adult audiences in clubs dedicated to jazz, folk, and cabaret performance; and highlights the distinctive way that music clubs staged the meeting of public and private life “because club going is taken to be a regular or routine activity, rather than a special occasion” (17). While rock figures as the principal field of transformation throughout the second volume of The History of Live Music in Britain, these chapters evince the continued complexity of the narrative that the authors build around their subject. Notably, volume two also pays more attention to Black British musicians, examining the distinctive club culture that emerged to support reggae and African pop styles during a period of increased immigration; and the racial tensions stemming from that same surge in the Black population that gave rise both to right-wing violence at live music events and to a string of concerts and carnivals held under the banner of Rock Against Racism (193).Rock in the 1960s and 1970s provoked a sort of paradigm shift in the field of concert production signaled by a variety of indicators: larger venues became favored over smaller ones; touring bands began carrying their own extensive sound and lighting systems along with crews to install and uninstall them from one show to the next; and concert promoters built new codes of professionalization in conjunction with the heightened generation of revenue. For Frith et al. these changes are neither triumphant nor cause for handwringing over the perils of “selling out.” Instead, their primary concern remains what they discuss more extensively in volume three as “live music ecology,” a framework that gives priority to “the environments in which live music-making practices develop and change, in their fragility and resilience” (2021, 219). Regarding the growing festival movement of the 1970s, for example, the authors document intensified regulatory efforts that, they stress, are not simply repressive but instead serve to distinguish between those festivals deserving of support (typically the most conventionally commercial ventures) and those undeserving (usually the more countercultural, and often free festivals) (2019, 85). The expansion of the concert industry also stimulated its inverse, a rededication to clubs or small venue-based music evident in the pub rock scene, punk, Northern soul, and disco. In volume two’s penultimate chapter, the authors explore what they call the “discontents” of the era’s rock musicians, returning to issues of musical labor they had treated so extensively in the first volume. While the economic circumstances of the most successful rock artists had changed dramatically over the course of two decades, musicians overall struggled to retain autonomy over their work as they sought to accommodate the demands placed upon them to record new music and then tour to support it, a cycle that could seem never ending (176–78).Live Aid, the 1985 globally televised mega-event featuring daylong concerts in London’s Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia’s John F. Kennedy Stadium, sets the stage for the third and last volume of The History of Live Music in Britain. Treated only briefly by Frith et al., it holds mainly symbolic importance in the study’s narrative as an emblem of the globalization of the live music business that took hold with growing prominence throughout the 1990s and up to the present day. Mega-events, it would seem, foreshadow mega-corporations, three of which—Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and AEG—are concisely profiled in chapter two. That these companies, all housed in North America, come to exert increasing control over the British live music industry marks a substantial change from the pre-existing conditions of concert production where national boundaries were less porous. Just as significantly, these companies approached the work of live music promotion with a heightened drive for creating new revenue streams. As the authors describe, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, “the most successful rock concerts had primarily become means to ends more appropriate to a new era: retail expenditure, returns on speculative investment and data mining” (2021, 26).Frith et al. complement this top-down perspective on the evolving live music industry with a more in-the-field approach based on the extensive research they’ve done interviewing concert promoters. Chapter three of the third volume is based almost entirely on this source material and provides a rich analysis of the ways in which promoters have experienced these structural changes in their own working experience. As they do in so many parts of their study, the authors stress continuity as well as transformation. For many promoters, adapting to the era of corporate consolidation in live music production was a way to continue the work they had been doing all along, while also gaining access to the new resources offered by companies that promoted events on a global scale (36). Yet the terms of their work had changed, not just because in many instances they were working for much bigger companies, but also due to the shifting balance of power that existed between the live and recorded sectors of the music industry. With revenues from recorded music declining rapidly, live music assumed a new centrality in the financial calculations that artists, agents, and managers made about building careers. Always a risk-based endeavor, the economic uncertainty of concert promotion was magnified as artists demanded a larger cut of revenues; whereas the trust and loyalty that helped facilitate strong working relations between promoters and artists became more fragile. Promoters felt these circumstances palpably as they navigated the new conditions under which they worked, something the authors capture in an interview with promoter Paul Latham: “The risk in promotions is now too great. If you get it wrong it’s because an agent’s jacked up the fees too high, created a bidding war that was artificial, and then got it guaranteed, and everything’s guaranteed now. If you get one of those wrong, it can wipe out your entire promotion’s profit in one tour” (37).A different sort of bottom-up view comes to the foreground in one of the final chapters of volume three. “Live Music in the Digital Age” ponders the implications of the new media landscape, expanding upon another of the features heralded by Live Aid wherein live music events became more integrated into other sorts of media spectacle. One might expect extensive engagement with Philip Auslander’s claims about the significance of “mediatization” as it bears upon contemporary notions of liveness, and indeed many of the insights in this chapter reflect upon such matters.4 Methodologically, however, Frith et al. eschew Auslander’s performance-centered style of analysis in favor of an approach that prioritizes live music participants, whether members of the audience, performers, or promoters. The resulting chapter ultimately has less to do with digital media for the most part than with the nature of the live music experience writ large, and indeed represents the authors’ most extensive engagement with the “concert experience” to be found in the project’s three volumes (198). Their most fundamental insight into the subject is also in a sense the most basic: that “the pleasure of live music is not just watching music being made; it is watching music being made as part of an audience” (200). Simple as it sounds, this observation also pinpoints one of the primary reasons why live music events have remained consequential in an age of digital media (and why, as we begin to contemplate life after the COVID-19 pandemic, the so-called “return” of live music is often taken as an index of how much a sense of normalcy might be restored).The culminating chapter of The History of Live Music in Britain explores the aforementioned theme of live music ecology, a concept that can be seen to inform the project as a whole and provide a sort of connecting thread. A feature of each of the three volumes is a series of “snapshots” of three musical cities—Bristol, Glasgow, and Sheffield—which suggest something of the diversity of the musical ecosystem that the authors explore. Primarily the work of co-author Emma Webster, these snapshots use information drawn from combing through local news sources to offer a concise survey of the venues that existed in a given city at a given time (the years of the snapshots are 1962, 1976, and 2007), a sampling of some of the shows that happened there, and a suggestion of some of the larger trends that can be observed through local live music conditions. The last proper chapter of volume three synthesizes information from the three cities to consider the factors that allow live music to be successfully promoted at the local level.Framing the chapter is a debate that has occurred in recent years about the question of whether local grassroots music venues—the sort of venues that are not operating under the ownership of a global corporation such as Live Nation—are becoming an endangered species. The fear that such venues were being squeezed out by changes in zoning and commercial development patterns had become such that the mayor of London even established a Music Venues Taskforce in 2015 (221). Taking a longue durée view of the matter, Frith et al. suggest that the closing of music venues is not in itself the sign of a crisis because the transience of music venues has been a constant feature of live music history from the beginning (229). They reframe the issue from one of scarcity to one of sustainability, suggesting that a focus on any given venue or even on the overall number of venues in a particular setting is an insufficient index of the strength of the live music ecosystem. What matters is not simply how many venues exist in a location but the diversity of venues, the relationships between them, and the success with which venues and the people who run them are able to connect with the needs and desires of local audiences. Interviews with promoters in Bristol, Glasgow, and Sheffield shed light on the various levels of calculation that go into decisions about the right fit between venue and artist, what makes a venue appealing to audiences, and how venues reflect the neighborhoods in which they reside. One of the ongoing challenges in reflecting on this deeply localized level of live music is that it is often difficult, once a venue becomes known for presenting certain styles of music or for attracting a particular kind of audience, to change the nature of its appeal. The evanescence of music venues varies according to genre—dance-oriented scenes are most subject to fluctuation, whereas more tradition-oriented styles, such as classical, folk and jazz, commonly occur in spaces of longer standing. Ultimately, the authors suggest, to understand how live music works requires not only knowledge of the places where it occurs but comprehension of the “musical motivations” that enable promoters, performers, and audiences to find common ground when they plan for an event and enter a venue (239). It is those motivations, rather than the comings and goings of the venues themselves, that form the basis of a sustainable live music ecology.The History of Live Music in Britain is a truly multi-disciplinary work that is strengthened by the combined perspectives of the four co-authors, who bring specializations in sociology, political economy, and cultural studies. That said, the project definitely favors a social scientific methodology rather than one informed by musicology or a more textually centered kind of humanities scholarship. All three volumes offer richly textured narratives that bridge structural factors with first-person accounts and mix the perspectives of live music producers and audiences to illuminating effect. Ruth Finnegan’s The Hidden Musicians especially seems to inform the study’s effort to incorporate the quotidian aspects of live music experience, while the concentration on the local character of live music evokes three decades of scene and place-based scholarship, perhaps most notably Sara Cohen’s various works on the ways that popular music shapes the contours of urban life.5Most lacking in the three volumes is any sustained analysis of the character of live music performances as such. Frith et al., when they turn their attention to the role played by musicians in the evolving state of live music, mainly emphasize issues of musical work: the conditions under which musicians perform, how their labor is affected by local and national state regulations, and how they negotiate a continually changing set of opportunities. In a move analogous to their city “snapshots,” the authors close each of the three volumes of their history with a profile of a single Rolling Stones gig, which collectively provide another small window onto the transformations that have taken hold in the larger live music field at different moments in time (in this case, 1963, 1976, and 2006). Yet even here, where the focus turns to a single artist and a single show, the main issues are material and structural, concerning the size of the venue, how the tickets are sold, how the financial arrangements are organized, and other similar matters. One might say that this approach itself is another of the project’s principal innovations. Against nearly all popular histories of live music and many academic ones as well—Ian Inglis’s edited collection Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time comes to mind6—Frith et al. insist that the truly essential features of live music occur not on stage but in all the work that happens before, after, and around the performances themselves. Their approach is vital precisely because it is this extra-musical work that has received the least sustained attention. Nonetheless, the relative absence of deep engagement with the substance of live music as performance in their history leaves a notable lacuna at the center of an otherwise formidable achievement.A three-volume study of live music in Britain begs for comparison with other national histories. Having spent more than a decade researching the parallel history of live music in the U.S., I am struck above all by the complex ways in which British and American live music have been interconnected. At the start of Frith et al.’s history, U.S. musicians faced significant restrictions performing in England due to protective measures enforced by the British musicians’ union, a circumstance that not only inhibited the ability of U.S. musicians to perform but shaped the British reception of jazz, rock and roll, and other “imported” styles. In the next decade, the marked growth of the rock concert economy in Britain was spurred in part by the even more rapid expansion of the U.S. market, where the Beatles’ 1965 concert at Shea Stadium prefigured the coming era of arena and stadium concerts. Here, though, the two countries significantly diverged. Great Britain during the 1960s and 1970s never had the infrastructure to support the large-scale concert tours that became commonplace in the U.S. during this period. What the U.K. developed instead was a bustling culture of music festivals that endured through the 1970s and 1980s even as the festival movement in the U.S. lost momentum. These contrasting trajectories gave rise to two quite different live music economies that nonetheless remained deeply intertwined. Live Aid was a notable instance of U.S./U.K. collaboration that existed somewhere in the grey zone between stadium concert, festival, and a new kind of mass media event. The growing globalization and corporatization of the live music industry that followed in its wake was largely driven by North American interests and had the effect of effacing some of the distinctions between the two settings—for example, by creating more arena-style concert venues in the U.K., and by rebuilding and reinvesting in music festivals in the U.S. Yet the state continues to play a much larger role in both supporting live music and regulating it in the U.K. as compared with the U.S., and at the local level the two countries have distinct sorts of club cultures due to stylistic differences in grassroots musical trends and preferences and contrasting demographic patterns with regard to race, class, and immigration.At the opening of volume one of their study, Frith et al. posit that “it is through the history of live music that we can grasp the changing relationship of the public and private in an era of great technological and social change. It has always been through the live—public—experience making and listening to music that it has been most deeply embedded in people’s everyday lives and in their understanding of their personal and social identities” (2013, x). Some might question whether this formulation has the effect of reifying live music by dramatizing its realness as against more mediated forms of musical experience. Another recently published work on the subject, Fabian Holt’s Everyone Loves Live Music—also by a participant in the 2011 conference—offers a biting critique of the rubric of “live music,” suggesting that the phrase has become inseparable from the marketing imperatives of twenty-first-century consumer capitalism.7 The authors of The History of Live Music in Britain are far from naïve on this score, however, and they close their project with a critique of the rhetoric of the “benefits” that live music and other arts and culture forms are perceived to provide to consumers that drives much state cultural policy in the neoliberal era. Writing against the market-centered model that frames such inquiries, Frith et al. put their core question most provocatively: “What is the experience that defines the ‘experience economy’?” (2021, 253). Their answer, after more than six-hundred pages of sustained investigation, is that “the starting point of understanding the value of live music is the interplay of transcendent and everyday experiences” (254). The History of Live Music in Britain may ultimately be stronger in conveying the everyday, material features of live music than the pursuit of transcendence, but in stressing the inseparability of the two, the authors provide a compelling foundation on which future research can be built.