Neoliberalism in the Music Industries
Culture, commodity, copyright, conglomeration, censorship… the creative industries.
This paper repositions the current state of neoliberal capitalism, and its wide-reaching effects, as the result of the national/corporate struggles to mobilize cheap creative labour while monopolizing the world’s most valuable resource: knowledge.
[Introduction]
The global music industries are a complex entanglement of actors and activities (Sterne 2014). In order to present a global perspective of the music industries, I focus on theoretical concepts underpinning market transactions and its actors. In this quasi-literature review, I organize the breadth of available literature around the ubiquitous class of objects within each market: commodities. While introducing the commodity, I consider the various difficulties that musical commoditization poses, and how major actors in the musical markets approach those difficulties in the present climate. I distinguish three major actors: Governments, Corporations, and Produsers (Bruns, 2008), the latter chosen carefully in the context of this paper).
The current manifestation of the music industries exists within a larger cultural trend: neoliberal capitalism. In this paper, I illustrate how the progression from commerce to neoliberal capitalism is encoded into the inception of musical commodities. To do so, I draw upon a variety of perspectives, each confronting a unique aspect of the musical (and cultural) economies: economics, legal studies, media/internet studies, and social studies. Virtually every account of the music/creative industries contains serious criticisms on the impact of Western neoliberal capitalism on the well-being of its citizens. I attempt to trace these criticisms down to the nature of musical commodification.
I will first introduce the musical commodity as the central object of exchange within the music industries. Following, I review government intervention in the creation of stable cultural markets via Western copyright law. Riding on the coattails of copyright reform, I discuss the development of culture industries and the subsequent flare-up of corporate conglomeration. Finally, I consider the blurred status of cultural producers and consumer markets of musical commodities, as well as their marginalization.
[Musical Commodities]
Objects which may be exchanged for money are known as commodities. Commodities can be defined in two different ways. First, the anthropological approach conceives of commodities as physical objects which, at some points in their physical “lives”, are available for monetary valuation in a context of standardized exchange values (Appadurai, Kopytoff, Simmel). Second, and far preceding the anthropological perspective, is the Marxist view of commodity. In Marxist terms, a commodity is viewed as an object of labor containing a use-value which is exchangeable for money (Marx, Weber). Central to both perspectives is the perception of commodity as an object exchangeable for money. Both perspectives also demand a minimum of shared ideology between actors engaged in exchange. These shared beliefs include: faith in money, the concept of ownership, and stable standards of value (called “regimes”). Commodification is the process of rendering objects into commodities.
Music has no economic exchange value. Sonic sensations are not a tangible object. As such, it follows that any music must be converted (distributed) through a medium of tangible objects in order to qualify as a commodity. The music economies are, therefore, concerned with the distribution of music-as-items; the music industries are defined as the producers of various musical commodities (Williamson & Cloonan 2007, Sterne 2014). There are four regimes of musical commodification: 1) live performances, 2) printed text, 3) recorded sound (Taylor 2015); as well as 4) branded experience (Fleicher 2017). These four solutions are arranged chronologically; as I describe later, the commodification of music depends wholly on technology. These methods of transferring musical ideas into tangible products are a cornerstone of the modern music industries.
As described by Appadurai (1988), drawing on Simmel (1907), a necessary condition for the mobilization of capital is desire, the judgement that an object has a use-value. In conjuring musical commodities, the music industries also had to engender a cultural context in which musical commodities had value. With each regime of musical commodification, predating capitalism, artists and music industrialists marketed (and, subsequently, advertised) their commodities over long periods in order to persuade favorable cultural evolution. Furthermore, in order for these commodities to “globalize” (to increase international commodity flow), value judgements must be shared across peoples, internationally. This value-standardization is known as a “regime of value” (Appadurai 1988, 15). Constructing such regimes necessitates a concerted effort on behalf of the music industries, frequently via the creation of influential industry interest groups and unions, and–later on–the corporations themselves.
The final metaphysical problem the music industry confronts is that of ownership. It is here that I turn to the next actor of the global music industries: government.
[Government]
As an intangible “object”, music is not physically constrained in its reproduction. Musical commodities are simply the media through which musical expressions are distributed. Upon consumption, music is not destroyed but becomes a “public good” redistributable by its owners (Straw 2002). The original “owner” of the music loses ownership as soon as her expression is distributed, and the subsequent owners may redistribute the music ad-infinitum. This recapitulates the initial problem of the previous section, but now with commodity production: without individual ownership there is no supply scarcity, and therefore no value. In order to re-mobilize value, scarcity must be artificially imposed through top-down market regulation: governance.
Western countries adopted an ideology in which an “author” can lay claim to her “original idea(s)” within an “expression/work”. In the eyes of the law, music is an idea that can be expressed into an object or work. Ideas cannot be subject to natural scarcity, but their physical expressions are. In Marxist terms, original ideas represent the labour-time invested by the author into the work, rendering it a commodity. Commodities, then, can be subject to scarcity through the creation of artificial monopolies (e.g. limiting distribution, price-setting). The claim to originality and, subsequently, ownership was then recognized under a series of rights known as copyright:
“Copyright is … a “bundle” of rights that includes the exclusive right to make copies, authorize others to make copies, create derivative works such as translations and displays in other media, sell the work, perform the work publicly, and petition court for relief in case others infringe on any of these rights. Control of these rights can be transferred — or “licensed” — via contract with another party.” (Vaidhyanathan 2001, 20–21)
Copyright facilitates artificial monopoly by giving the author sole ownership over the commodity’s production and distribution, as well as a means to enforce their rights. Through copyright, governments were able to introduce market stability in the value of musical commodities. The copyright solution to music’s value problem is the other cornerstone of today’s music industries. Finally, because copyright is the method through which the culture industries create value, academics have suggested that “the contemporary music industry is best understood as a ‘copyright industry’” (Wikström 2020, 19).
There are three issues inherent in the formulation of copyright. First, the establishment of limited monopolies opens the door to further monopolistic tendencies. Next, the right to restrict the flow of ideas manifests itself as various forms of censorship. Finally, explored in the following section, issues of scale complicate international trade. Historically, the first two issues arose together with the advent of the British copyright system in the 16th century. As Vaidhyanathan elaborates, the British Crown granted monopoly-status to a handful of publishers in London, limiting their publications to pre-approved books (with license from the author). This way, the Crown censored anti-monarchical rhetoric, publishers stabilized prices of the book market, and authors were protected from piracy. In the 17th century, the Crown realized it could maintain censorship without publisher-monopolies: publishers would continue self-censoring as a means of currying favor with politicians. Immediately after losing their privileged status, printers and authors banded together and successfully lobbied for limited monopolies. From then, on, censorship continued as a form of political obsequiousness leveraged by copyright conglomerates in order to lobby for increased protection (Scherzinger 2005).
With the development of the American copyright system in the 18th century, the censorship capacities of copyright were further realized. The American founding fathers recognized that the incentive for authors/creators to produce public goods (ideas) is necessarily derived via a form of public tax (Frith 1988). Copyright taxes the public by restricting the access/flow of ideas. Censorship is the restriction of the flow of ideas; through copyright, rights-holders and publishers censor the public. In a careful analysis of censorship activities, Cloonan and Garofalo remark that “copyright can censor at all three levels: prior restraint, restriction, and suppression” (Cloonan & Garofalo, 2009). The founding fathers had experienced the censorship effects of British copyright pre-revolution, and recognized that the safety of a democratic society depends on the ability for the public to freely circulate and debate ideas (Sheehan 2009, chapters 5 and 6). It is thus that, for two centuries, American copyright strongly favored the public. This changed due to the following:
The third issue arising from the copyright system is its cultural-specificity. Similarly to the marketing projects of music industries, copyright prompts a set of cultural values. The regime of value engendered by copyright stipulates an ideology of ownership, the idea-expression dichotomy, originality, authorship, bounded works, and negotiation between the public and the creator. As international trade increased with the protective copyright regimes across the North Atlantic, the United States was forced to comply with Europe and expand its copyright protections in the early 20th century (Vaidhyanathan 2001, Chapter 2). With the present flurry of international trade in the cultural industries, the Western regimes of value inherent within copyright/intellectual policy (IP) are imposed onto nations in the form of international trade agreements, further complicating matters (Melville 2017). In the following section, I discuss how this feedback loop of issues escalates in the global digital revolution.
[Creative Industries]
That musical commodities can be valued does not guarantee their remuneration. Because works must be original cultural expressions, the use-value of each new work is uncertain — it is known only after it has been commoditized and distributed. As such, works demand significant investment in order to produce, market, and distribute before they can begin to generate income. This trait of musical commodities favors economies of scale; cost-cutting, stream-lined production. The effective approach to profit-maximization and risk-reduction is conglomeration. As such, conglomerates were economically viable even before they were politically beneficial. Moreover, the commodification of music grows increasingly profitable with technological developments. In the first chapter of his book, Aram Sinnreich describes the history of conglomeration from the music industries, climaxing at its most centralized, oligopolistic form in the digital revolution (Sinnreich, 2013). This is the final cornerstone of the modern music industries: conglomeration.
Throughout history, technology has served to facilitate the creation and distribution of ideas. The most recent development, the advent of the internet, is a continuation of this narrative: its sole purpose is to facilitate the transfer of ideas. While the industry conceives of cultural expressions as primary resources, and governments see them as ideas, the internet views cultural expression as information. Due to its ability to instantaneously distribute information, the internet virtually erased distribution costs and borders. Differences in national copyright policy permitted loopholes through which internet users could freely access content from foreign websites. This created a familiar problem: no supply scarcity in musical commodities means that musical commodities have no value. In a conservative attempt to resist the shift to digital distribution, the music industries lost — or caused the loss of — the commodity value (Marshall 2019).
The sole remedy to this problem was, again, government copyright expansion. Because this problem involves transnational policy, IP would have to be standardized globally. However, the technological developments preceding the internet also had a significant impact on national economies. Shortly before the digital revolution, wealthy nations were beginning to experience deindustrialization: the reduction of industrial labour and a shift towards service economy (Rowthorn & Ramaswamy 1997). In an attempt to preserve economic growth, wealthy nations focused their efforts on developing service-based economies: “Americans quickly came to realize that technology held the key to future prosperity on the world stage” (Sundara Rajan 2008, 4). As Sundara Rajan explains, information technologies are only as valuable as the information they transmit; information which is, of course, copyrightable. Thus, tech and culture industries were grouped together as the “creative industries” (Pratt & Jeffcutt 2009). And prosperous they are: “the creative industries are now, and have been for the past decade, growing at about twice the rate of the aggregate economy” (Potts & Cunningham 2008, 14). The United Kingdom, more explicitly than the United States, campaigned for stimulation of the creative industries: “In the 1990s,” writes Hesmondhalgh “the notion of the cultural industries or the cultural sector became increasingly attached … to the goals of regeneration and employment creation” (Hesmondhalgh 2008, 5). In order to incentivize the rapid growth of service based economies, these countries created favorable legal conditions by 1) increasing protection for rights-holders, and 2) deregulating monopoly limitations.
Thus, governments and industry interests banded together in a global crusade against internet P2P sharing “piracy” (Sinnreich 2013). The World Trade Organization (WTO) was formed in 1995, with special trade agreements (TRIPS) which legitimized the copyright industries and rendered them enforceable via American-led policies (Internet Treaties and the 1998 DMCA). Conglomerates merged into super-conglomerates (Google, Apple Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft), proliferating regimes of value in an attempt to further engender market certainty and reduce investment risk. Thus, the global expansion of Western conglomerations occurred hand-in-hand with the expansion of Western IP policy.
[Produsers]
In an attempt to populate the service industries, de-industrializing policies of the 80s and 90s began circulating pro-creative-labour propaganda, primarily targeting youth populations (Cunningham 2002; Hesmondhalgh 2008). Government policy, along with the pro-artist rhetoric by major conglomerates, glorified creative labour. With new digital production and distribution tools, companies increasingly promote the idea that anyone can “make it” as a creator. This has lead to an over-saturation of the cultural labor force (Brown 2020, Medium), with consequences for the agency and autonomy of creative workers;
There is no longer a concrete distinction between creators and consumers. While it is true that “production and consumption … need to be considered as separate moments in an interlinked process” (Hesmondhalgh 2010, 277), I argue that–under the gaze of media companies–they form an indistinguishable pool of human resources called “produsers”. Individual users now represent a collectivity from which information produced from within can be mediated/curated by the creative industries and brokered back to users. On one hand, fan/audience interaction on the web is a form of content creation (Livingstone 2003), which is regulated and appropriated as a marketing tool by media companies (Bird 2011). On the other hand, artists and creative workers have also been relegated to “content creators” (Negus 2019). Artists consistently bemoan exploitative practices and the difficulty of earning a sustainable income through creative work (Hall 2002; Hesmondhalgh 2013). At best, a few successful creative laborers may attain creative agency and lead highly-fulfilling professional lives. At its worst, the epitomization of artistic creation represents a classic marxist strategy: the ideological coercion of the working class, resulting in the perpetuation of its own economic submission.
Beyond facilitating an abundance of creative labour, the internet enables media corporations to develop increasingly-efficient marketing and distribution strategies. In this way, the music industries form just one important part of a creative industry which increasingly seeks to “socialize” itself in order to form brands and broker content-based social interactions (Taylor 2015). Via data mining and analysis, markets are increasingly fragmented within which a variety of new commodities can circulate (Prey 2018). The shift towards media platforms has positioned cultural commodities as the substratum for the brokering of various social interactions. Within these multi-sided markets, the goal of cultural commodities is to maintain user attention, allowing platforms to simultaneously exchange secondary commodities such as user-data, advertisements, and social sharing (Nieborg & Poell 2018). The subversion of cultural goods as a medium for social markets, predicted by both Marx and Adorno 100 years ago, has heightened to the point where music can only be sustained by corporate sponsorship (Gilbert 2012; Adorno 2001, Chapter 3). I reiterate my analysis of prosumers, even within platforms: “user-driven cultural production [produsage] is clearly thriving but is subsumed under the wider economic regime of “platform capitalism” (ibid., 4279).
[Conclusion]
The trajectory from the commoditization of music to modern-day NLC has been relatively straightforward. Initially without value, music was materialized as a commodity in a competitive economic system and granted monopoly status by a political system. This marked the beginnings of a slippery-slope: the censoring of ideas. As technology, the means through which music is commodified, evolved, more means for competition engendered more profits, more power, greater favoritism from the government, and more censorship. This cycle accelerates, providing us with an ideology of heightened commodification and efficient profiteering: neoliberal capitalism. The effects of such activity are felt across all levels of society. With an understanding of these conceptual materials and their realization in the marketplace, it is vital that industries venture into alternative models of economic activity. In order to maintain a diverse, ethical, and democratic society, we must decouple neoliberal capitalism with the commodification — the exchange — of ideas/information.
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