Britain’s music industry now earns more from exports than its steel industry does

Evidence

British bands such as Blur, Oasis, the Prodigy, Pulp and the Verve dominate much of the rest of the world. Singers such as Roni Size and Jazzie B. are putting black music on the map. And the British record and CD industry - as a result of the talent that lies behind it - is one of the great strengths of our modern economy. (Smith, 1998:7) … A small quibble here that neither Jazzy B. nor Roni Size are singers in any conventional sense. He went on to boast that the British music industry was currently worth four billion dollars to the UK economy and two billion dollars worth of this income comes from overseas sales and the record industry employs some 115,000 people. Then without a hint of selfconciousness he commented: “Its net export earnings are bigger than those of our steel industry, and our musicians’ union is now bigger than our miner’s union” (p. 81). The paradox here is that the lifeblood of much of the subcultural dynamism of Britain’s youth was a seismic echo of the political and economic crisis that racked Britain during the 1970s and 1980s and now it has emerged as one of its most significant industries. This in itself casts a shadow over the early subcultural analysts of the “New Left” who claimed that in every “safety pin” and “Ben Sherman” shirt could be found the vestiges of youth cultural refusal and resistance. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3017

Categorization

• CANDY: The fact that British music exports out-earn its steel industry is a striking, bar-trivia-level nugget.
• XREF: Connects to punk/subculture theory debates (Hebdige’s subculture-as-resistance accounts vs. their co-optation), and to the broader literature on commodification of resistance.