The late 1960s and the 70s saw a sea change in media coverage of popular culture, especially cinema and music. Film reviewers and pop journalists were joined by movie critics and rock writers, who brought scholarly rigour to the study and interpretation of films and songs. One of the most influential of this new breed was Phil Hardy, who has died aged 69 after a heart attack. Phil was a pioneering writer and encyclopedia editor, and in later years a respected and independent-minded commentator on the international music business.

Phil was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, the only child of a Polish father and Yorkshire-born mother, whose surname he took. After attending St Aloysius grammar school in Highgate, north London, he went to Sussex University. There he pursued American studies, and his love of American culture blossomed during a year at the University of California, Berkeley (1968-69). He returned to the Sussex campus with a stash of LPs by the likes of Frank Zappa and Quicksilver Messenger Service, and a collection of psychedelic posters.

He was by now an ardent film enthusiast, and with a group of friends staged an electoral coup to take control of the university film society. The society's funds supported the Brighton Film Review, a critical journal co-founded by Phil, Gary Herman and Thomas Elsaesser, now professor of cinema at the University of Amsterdam.

Next, Phil conceived and edited Rockbooks, a series of intelligently written and elegantly designed studies of individual artists. Four of these appeared in 1971, but the series foundered as its production company went under in controversial circumstances. Undeterred, Phil pressed on to co-edit with me a three-volume Encyclopedia of Rock, whose success was due to its distinguished consultant editors, who included Charlie Gillett and Greil Marcus, and to the dynamism of our publisher at Panther, Nick Webb. In the late 90s, we were able to reprise this project as the Faber Companion to 20th-Century Popular Music.

By the end of the 70s, Phil had begun to investigate the activities of the music business. He became an adviser to the Greater London Enterprise Board, an offshoot of Ken Livingstone's Greater London council, and in 1986 he travelled to East Africa to research and script Food, Trucks and Rock'n'Roll, a documentary film examining how the funds raised by Band Aid had been spent. Much later, he was to advise the World Bank on its plans to invest in the African music industry.

From 1992, Phil was the editor of Financial Times Music & Copyright, an industry newsletter widely read by record company executives, media analysts and policymakers. This was launched after Phil and I, as his co-founder, had managed to persuade sceptical FT managers that the music industry was more than just a bunch of overpaid exhibitionists and drug takers. Phil edited the newsletter for more than 20 years until its new owners decided it should be run in-house. He refused the offer of a consultant role, cherishing his freedom of action. If it is true that freelances either have many bosses or only one (themselves), Phil was always of the latter camp. He briefly ran an online publication, before setting out in 2010 to write a series of books about the history of the music industry. Download! came out in 2013 from Omnibus Press, which will issue his study of music publishing later this year. At the time of his death, he was working on a volume charting the rise of Universal Music, the world's largest record company.

Phil never lost his love of cinema. He wrote studies of the directors Sam Fuller and Raoul Walsh in the 70s, and in the 80s edited five definitive encyclopedias of individual genres. A British Film Institute Companion to Crime followed in 1991.

Phil was married to Carole James, a polytechnic lecturer, who died in 1989. He later formed a partnership with the Oscar-winning set decorator Stephenie McMillan. The couple moved to a farm in rural Norfolk a decade ago. Stephenie died in 2013. Phil is survived by Joel and Emily, his children with Carole, and two grandchildren.

• Philippe George Hardy, author, journalist and editor, born 7 April 1945; died 8 April 2014