This special issue of Popular Music has its origins in a seminar organised at the University of Stirling in 2004. This meeting, one of a series on cultural policy, brought together researchers from a number of European countries who were asked to describe state music policy in their respective countries and to reflect on what differences, if any, such policies had made to recent national music history. As the seminar’s organisers, we were interested in a couple of issues: first, how policy approaches to popular music had changed since it first began to appear on the European political agenda in the 1970s; second, how local political and cultural conditions had affected ideas of what popular music policy could or should be.