Country music and cultural industry: mediating structures in transnational media flow

Abstract

As popular music genre, Americanness is one of the things country music signifies. The popular music industries are an integral component of an emerging global media environment, however. What happens to country music when it is in another country? This is a question in two parts. The first asks how local cultural practices interlock with the industrial structures through which generic conventions and taste formations can circulate transnationally. The second asks how this genre is fed back through the institutional channels which are contiguous with national borders. In the context of transnational media flow, increased attention to the role played by the national adjective - here, Canadian country music - can therefore help identify mediating structures and, in the process, point out the role of media policy in cultural industry. State policy as mediating structure is not in itself a useful thing, however. This article theorizes the nation as the site of a state apparatus whose goal is to ensure a space in which cultural producers’ relationships with institutions are not only structured but also structuring - to intervene in the plays of affect and taste which characterize culture’s production, consumption, and the circuit which binds them.