These Titles Do Not Mean Anything: Meaning-Making as Industrial Practice in Italian Library Music Records from the 1970s

The chapter proposes a theoretical framework to study meaning-making in library music, with an emphasis on the social processes that inform the construction and reception of musical meaning across television production. It focuses on the role of long-playing records in the industrial practice of Italian television during the 1970s, analysing the strategies employed to signify recorded musical texts through their surrounding paratexts – i.e., the formal and material components of recorded artefacts that help frame a specific meaning for a piece of music, such as titles, descriptions and cover images. Moving apart from a rigid signifier/signified communication model, the chapter sheds light on the various levels of mediation comprised in the process of selecting music for television, examining the ways library records have been used by industry professionals (musicians, publishers, music consultants) as functional objects capable of generating networks of culturally shared meanings.