Creativity and Cultural Production: A Study of Contemporary Western Popular Music Songwriting

The contemporary Western popular music industry tends to work within a paradigm of creativity that runs counter to current academic research. This research into creativity can be categorized as falling along a continuum from individual to contextual responsibility and ranges across a number of disciplines including psychology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and communication and media studies. However, it is the contention of this article that it is the systems model of creativity in particular, partially coupled with the similarly complex approach to cultural production presented by Pierre Bourdieu, which provides the most useful working platform to investigate the idea of creativity. Through the use of an ethnographic research methodology, this article investigates the systems model of creativity as it applies to contemporary Western popular music songwriting. It concludes that a contemporary Western songwriter's ability to make choices, and therefore be creative, is both circumscribed and facilitated by his or her knowledge of the domain of contemporary Western popular music and his or her access to, and knowledge of, the field that holds this knowledge that allows the conclusion, at the more philosophical level, that these ideas can also be presented as an account of the interdependence of agency and structure within the workings of the creative system.