A new model of health emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health.

Under this new “science of work,” fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers’ capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.

In Making Value, Timothy D. Taylor examines how people’s conceptions of value inform and shape their production and consumption of music. Drawing on anthropological value theory, Taylor theorizes music’s economic and noneconomic forms of value both ethnographically and historically. He covers the creation and exchange of value in a wide range of contexts: indie rock scenes, an Irish traditional music session, the work of music managers, how supply chains function to create various forms of value, how trendspotters seek out and create value, and how musical performances act as media of value. Taylor shows that to focus on value is to attend to what is meaningful to people as they move through their worlds. Ultimately, Taylor demonstrates that theorizing value aids us in moving beyond the music itself toward understanding how musicians, workers in the music business, and audiences struggle to make and maintain what they value.

While music as labor feeds into the capitalist cultural industries, this book proves that in this sector informality greatly permeates and governs power relations and the allocations of resources. The significant level of informal involvement of the household in the creative and reproductive processes is also explored. It is particularly in the semiperipheral context that the relationship between home-based work and paid work is unbalanced: Emília Barna's field data are from Hungary and range from 2018 to 2021. The same context also implies considerable involvement of the state and its subsidies, as well as the important role of gatekeepers’ political capital.

This book embraces the widest possible range of workers in the music industry. It deals with all music genres from high-flying to commercial and observes various workers in the production chain beyond musicians. Niche segments of the sector, such as YouTube-based commercial hip hop, are given special treatment. Using a variety of empirical research methods, the study examines the trends as workers are pushed towards digital entrepreneurship and platform work, on the one hand, and live performance, on the other. The focus on domestic work and informality offers a feminist analysis of work in music. This approach sheds light on gendered divisions of labor and forms of (self-)exploitation that usually remain invisible. The book proposes a new model of cultural autonomy that takes account of the semiperipheral relationship of music industry workers and institutions to both the market and the state.

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In Working Musicians Timothy D. Taylor offers a behind-the-scenes look at the labor of the mostly unknown composers, music editors, orchestrators, recording engineers, and other workers involved in producing music for films, television, and video games. Drawing on dozens of interviews with music workers in Los Angeles, Taylor explores the nature of their work and how they understand their roles in the entertainment business. Taylor traces how these cultural laborers have adapted to and cope with the conditions of neoliberalism as, over the last decade, their working conditions have become increasingly precarious. Digital technologies have accelerated production timelines and changed how content is delivered, while new pay schemes have emerged that have transformed composers from artists into managers and paymasters. Taylor demonstrates that as bureaucratization and commercialization affect every aspect of media, the composers, musicians, music editors, engineers, and others whose soundtracks excite, inspire, and touch millions face the same structural economic challenges that have transformed American society, concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.