John Schmitt and his mother Maribell live in the small town of Dowdale. John is a teenage schoolboy who has just been offered an scholarship to a prestigious school. His mother is a religious fanatic and given to strange spells. She is terrified of demons and that John has something evil about him. John escapes to a cave he has discovered to get away from his mother and her odd spells. After the offer to the new school, Maribell breaks the telephone and John flees to his sanctuary, where he has his father’s tools and where he can fix almost everything, except an intriguing music box, the mechanisms of which refuse to obey his commands. After a night spent in the cave his seemingly deranged mother meets him at school and forbids him to go back until she lets him. John gives her the slip and meets up with a gypsy teen named Lu. Together they enter a world of shifting times and places, the world that the mist threatens and protects.

Drawing on a deep and long-term first-hand engagement with major labels in the early years of the 21st century, this book sheds novel light ‘behind the scenes’, at a time of drastic and far-reaching transformation. Refreshingly, it centres not on artists and the most powerful decision-makers but on everyday experiences of work and sense-making among back-office corporate employees. Doing so reveals the internal activities and conflicts that, while hidden from immediate public view, enable processes of change: from paperwork, data systems, managerial pressures and redundancies to graduate training schemes, departmental politics and shared playlists. Following some of these more mundane features provides a new route into understanding the broader cultures and infrastructures of the global recording industry. This oft-forgotten office work tells a different story of contemporary digital music – one more sensitive to the complex intersections of bureaucracy and enterprise, passion and critique, knowledge and experience, that texture the conduct of work and organizational life.

All oceans are one ocean, water without end. Every story, every legend you have ever heard about the sea is true somewhere and at the heart of it all there is a truth that shapes the destiny of all other worlds, including our own: the Inner Sea The Endless Ocean is the story of Clare and Adrian Watts find themselves suddenly caught up in the currents of this larger world. With the arrival of a shipwrecked sailor their lives are forever changed as they are swept into a world of ritual and myth where only their unique heritage holds any hope of averting impending destruction.

Drawing on a deep and long-term first-hand engagement with major labels in the early years of the 21st century, this book sheds novel light ‘behind the scenes’, at a time of drastic and far-reaching transformation. Refreshingly, it centres not on artists and the most powerful decision-makers but on everyday experiences of work and sense-making among back-office corporate employees. Doing so reveals the internal activities and conflicts that, while hidden from immediate public view, enable processes of change: from paperwork, data systems, managerial pressures and redundancies to graduate training schemes, departmental politics and shared playlists. Following some of these more mundane features provides a new route into understanding the broader cultures and infrastructures of the global recording industry. This oft-forgotten office work tells a different story of contemporary digital music – one more sensitive to the complex intersections of bureaucracy and enterprise, passion and critique, knowledge and experience, that texture the conduct of work and organizational life.