Author: Jason Toynbee
Title: Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions
Year: 2000
Publisher: Arnold (London) / Oxford University Press (New York)
Type: Book
Toynbee’s target is the Romantic ideal of the solitary genius producing original work from inner inspiration — and his claim is that this model, whatever it does for poetry, falls apart the moment you ask how a pop record actually gets made. A pop record is made by a crowd. Co-writers sharpen the song, the producer shapes the sound, session players supply the performances, an arranger voices the texture, an engineer captures and mixes the result. Even the solo performer in apparent isolation is working inside conventions, genre expectations, and an audience relationship that frame the act of creation before a note is played. Toynbee’s name for this is “social authorship”: creativity in pop happens through social structures, not in spite of them.
Toynbee’s sharpest move is to argue that the Romantic model is not merely inaccurate but actively harmful. Treat self-authorship as the measure of artistic value and you systematically write off everyone who performs, arranges, produces, and engineers the record. The session player whose bass line is the reason a record works, the arranger who voices the strings, the producer who builds the sonic architecture — these are creative acts on any honest definition, yet the Romantic model makes them invisible by reserving “author” for whoever wrote the melody and lyrics. Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory, Toynbee argues the model survives because it pays: it serves whoever controls the intellectual property. If authorship resides in the composition, copyright law (which protects compositions more robustly than recordings or performances) rewards the “author” and leaves every other contributor unprotected.
Key contributions
- “Social authorship”: the working claim that creativity in pop is collaborative and institutional all the way down, never the lone-genius act the Romantic model assumes
- The double indictment of the Romantic model — empirically wrong (no pop record is made by one person) and economically interested (it serves whoever benefits from copyright’s tilt toward composition over performance and production)
- A framework connecting creativity to institutional context: the Brill Building, Motown, and modern production teams are not failures of individual vision but structures that enable creative work to happen more effectively than the lone-genius model allows
- The analysis of how genre conventions function as shared creative resources rather than constraints, making the line between “originality” and “convention” far blurrier than Romantic aesthetics admits
See also
- The songwriter-performer divide — Toynbee’s social authorship framework reframes the divide: it is a division of labor within a collaborative creative process rather than a hierarchy of creator over interpreter. The hierarchy was imposed by Romantic ideology and reinforced by copyright law.
- The pop factory — The factory model is, in Toynbee’s framework, a structure that enables creativity. The Brill Building and Motown are institutions of social authorship, not industrial standardization.
- Pop as craft — Toynbee’s argument supports the craft case by showing that the collaborative, institutional process of pop production is itself a form of creativity, not a degradation of it.
- Authenticity and its discontents — The Romantic model that Toynbee critiques is the intellectual foundation of the authenticity ideology: if only the individual “author” matters, then self-authored music is inherently more valuable than collaboratively produced music.
