It will not come as news to any of us that the music industry is changing rapidly, and that there seem to be some very obvious losers and winners from these changes. The big changes, of course, are all largely the consequence of the development of the internet and of digital media formats which can be reproduced and distributed by anyone, effectively cost-free. The losers are those musicians and corporations who have traditionally made their living through selling various types of musical commodity: most obviously recordings in physical formats such as vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, etc. The winners, it would seem, are those at the extreme ends of the distribution chain: consumers or users at the bottom, and the large-scale aggregators and distributors of media content - such as the Apple iTunes store, Google (through youtube), etc - at the top. What I’m going to do for the next few minutes is to think about the implications of some of these changes and how we can conceptualise them.
One of the central features of this transformation in the music industry is the effective de-commodification of music. In the 19th century, with the development of a market for sheet music, and the spread of public concerts, music became something which could be bought and sold for profit. This situation was obviously given a huge boost by the invention of sound recording at the end of the nineteenth century and the consequent growth of a world market for musical recordings. One of the key effects of the technological changes which I have already mentioned has been severely to weaken the commodity status of these recordings. A commodity always depends for its status and its value on its relative scarcity; once the reproduction and distribution of that commodity become effectively free, then it necessarily loses that value and that status. This is great news for consumers of music, but for producers, it means, quite simply, that they suddenly have nothing of value to sell. I think the question which then emerges for 21st century societies is: if we want to have professional musicians at all (and of course there are those who say we don’t need them), then how are we going to pay for them? How will their work be compensated, if not through selling their wares in an open marketplace?
Now, before coming back to this particular issue, I want to elucidate some of the conceptual issues raised by these questions. Firstly, I want to make a distinction between the two sets of ‘losers’ from this process whom I have already mentioned: musicians, and traditional record companies. In the terms that I’ve described them, both of these sets of actors are trying, ultimately, to sell musical commodities at a relative profit. However, there is a fundamental difference between them in terms of what the aimof generating those profits is. In the case of musicians, apart from a handful of very greedy and ambitious individuals, the aim is generally to generate enough income for a decent standard of living which will enable them to keep making their music. We might say the same about those independent record companies which have never generated large profits above those which are reinvested in support for new music. In the case of large record companies, however, the aim is not simply the generation of acceptable income for their employees, but the long-term, uninhibited, and unlimited accumulation of capital. The difference I am positing here, is therefore a fundamental, but surprisingly unusual one: between commerce on the one hand, and capitalism on the other.
This text was taken from a talk given at the Berlin Music Week.
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