This book presents the creative industries as a suite of practices intimately connected to political, economic, and cultural power. Seeking to illuminate the creative industries through critical cultural analysis, the book shows the extent to which creative labour shapes our shared cultural and political realities, good and bad. The author presents creative labour as a form of employment which typically operates well outside conventional industrial relationships, highlighting the importance of cultural as well as political and economic value. The book provides a view of the broader creative economy that shows up the effects and trends of its strange industrial relationships. It recognises new forms of audience labour as significant creative, political, cultural, and commercial forces, and frames cultures as preceptual systems, as systems of rules, conventions, mores, and laws. In so doing, the author provides a new cultural framework through which scholars, students and reflective practitioners can make critical judgements about the creative economy and its creative acts.