Independent Music and Digital Technology in the Philippines

Monika E. Schoop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315403243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Since the turn of the century, the impact of digital technologies on the promotion, production and distribution of music in the Philippines has both enabled and necessitated an increase in independent musical practices. In the first in-depth investigation into the independent music scene in the Philippines, Monika E. Schoop exposes and portrays the as yet unexplored restructurings of the Philippine music industries, showing that digital technologies have played an ambivalent role in these developments. While they have given rise to new levels of piracy, they have also offered unprecedented opportunities for artists. The near collapse of the transnational recording industry in the Philippines stands in stark contrast to a thriving independent music scene in the county's national capital region, Metro Manila, which cuts across musical genres and whose members successfully adjust to a rapidly evolving industry scenario. Independent practices have been facilitated by increased access to broadband Internet, the popularity of social media platforms and home recording technology. At the same time, changing music industry structures often leave artists with no other option but to operate independently. Based on extensive fieldwork online and offline, the book explores the diverse and innovative music production, distribution, promotion and financing strategies that have become constitutive of the independent music scene in twenty-first-century Manila.

1
Introduction

Aims and scope

Digital technologies have had major impacts on musical practices and have substantially altered the structure of the music industry. Timothy Taylor goes so far as to say that the advent of digital technology marks the beginning of the ‘most fundamental change in the history of Western music since the invention of music notation in the ninth century’ (Taylor 2001, 3). Until the rise of digital technology, promotion, production and distribution primarily used to be the realm of record labels, which had the means to cover recording costs and promotion and access to distribution networks. Digital formats,¹ such as the CD, and even more so non-physical formats, most notably MP3, enabled the creation of high quality copies. Combined with the opportunity to distribute music via the Internet, they have greatly challenged the former monopoly of the recording industry. Many record labels witnessed a sharp decline in sales and shifted their orientation towards other sources of revenue. While digitization is often blamed for the decline of the recording industry, it has also led to empowerment in other fields. Ever cheaper digital recording equipment and the ability to distribute music online have expanded musicians’ opportunities to operate independently. They produce music at home or in small studios, distribute their music via online platforms, found their own labels (online as well as offline), use social media in order to promote their music, and raise funds for their projects. Digital technology has not only harmed the major recording industry, it has also brought about an upsurge of independent practices. The main objective of this research is to investigate these practices. How do people in Metro Manila’s independent scene use technologies to record, distribute, promote, and finance their music? Since these practices take place in the context of changing music industry structures, which are again linked to technological innovations, these also have to be taken into account.

Just like in many other parts of the world, more and more musicians in the Philippines refer to themselves as ‘indie’. But what exactly does it mean to be ‘indie’? Pete Dale shows that the term itself is ambiguous and can denote a certain sound as well as a practice (Dale 2008, 173). While all of the examples covered in this book can be referred to as indie in the sense of independent practices or ‘do it yourself’, they might or might not be classified as indie in the sense of a certain sound. The music I encountered was manifold and was classified as belonging genres as different as indie pop, indie rock, shoegaze, various subgenres of electronica as well as hybrid forms. ‘Indie’ in terms of a certain sound was just one category among others.

Digital technology plays a prominent role in facilitating independent practices. In the following, I adapt a broad definition of technology, as suggested by Paul Théberge. Technology does not simply refer to objects (such as devices for sound recording or computers) but should rather be regarded ‘in terms of “practice” – including not only the various uses of machines but also, in a more general sense, the organization of production and consumption’ (Théberge 1999, 209). As Théberge notes,

Technology is also an environment in which we experience and think about music; it is a set of practices in which we engage in making and listening to musical sounds; and it is an element in the discourses that we use in sharing and evaluating our experiences, defining, in the process, what music is and can be. In this sense, the ensemble of electronic devices that are used to make, distribute and experience contemporary music are not simply a technical ‘means’ through which we experience music.

(Théberge 2001, 3)

He warns that ‘technology does not simply determine music-making’ (Théberge 2001, 3). Instead, people actively use technologies in different ways, for different purposes and in different contexts. Timothy Taylor also distances himself from technological determinism, but shows that the use of technologies is also restricted. He contrasts the extreme poles of technological determinism, which assumes that technology transforms its users directly, and voluntarism, supposing those technologies can be used without any restrictions and proposes a ‘practice theory of technology’, which acknowledges deterministic as well as voluntary tendencies (Taylor 2001, 26). Technologies are actively used, but their uses take place within certain structures and environments that again pose limits to their application.

When talking about digital technologies, it also has to be considered that calling them ‘new’ is in fact a misnomer since digital technology has been around for more than half a century (Sterne 2012, 7). Sterne notes that it is not the technologies themselves that are new, but rather the fact that they are widely used (Sterne 2012, 7). With regard to music production, for example, the spread and accessibility of digital recording technology has only taken place during the last two decades. In the Philippines, wide access to these technologies is even more recent and has only occurred in the last decade. In addition, it has to be kept in mind that new technologies are never completely new but are tied to other (pre)existing technologies and can be understood in relation to them (Taylor 2001, 7; Katz 2010, 4; Lysloff and Gay 2003, 13).

Taking this into account, the aim and scope of the research can now be sketched out. First of all, this introduction looks at the field of music and technology, exploring technology’s role in the discipline of ethnomusicology as well as the recording industry, before focusing on the research layout and the field sites. The two main parts of this book then address different aspects of music and digital technology in the Philippines and Metro Manila in particular. In Part I Metro Manila’s independent scene is portrayed and the question of who is empowered by new technologies is raised. Digital technology is often optimistically described as a democratizing force, facilitating widespread participation in music production and distribution (Théberge 1997, 72). In my fieldwork, I frequently encountered the statement that today everyone is indie (e.g. Aldus Santos, April 23, 2012; Caballa 2012; Robin Rivera, May 11, 2012). But do digital technologies really enable everyone to take part in independent practices? Timothy Taylor reminds us that if we assume that technology is democratizing, we need to ask, ‘In what ways and for whom?’ (Taylor 2001, 6). One of the aims is therefore to determine the boundaries of digital technology. Subsequently, the current state of the Philippine music industries and the impact of digital technology on the different sectors of the industries are laid out. The exploration does not only consider the major and independent recording industry but also takes into account the live music sector, music retail as well as radio, and traces shifting power relations and the rise of independent practices.

Part II then investigates how people in Metro Manila’s independent scene make use of technologies in order to operate independently. It gives concrete examples and shows different strategies employed for production, promotion, distribution and financing of music. Questions of whether people voluntarily operate independently are discussed, as well as the changing roles of artists and fans and digital technology’s potential for democratization and decentralization. In the following, not only personal experiences and academic literature are taken into account. The multivocality of Metro Manila’s music scene is also incorporated,² because after all, this book is not about computers and the Internet, but about people utilizing these technologies. As Rene T.A. Lysloff and Leslie C. Gay state: ‘Without the meaning conferred through use, technologies become dead objects, empty artefacts: our books turn into useless scraps of paper, our homes into piles of wood, and our computers into bits of wire and plastic within hulks of metal’ (Lysloff and Gay 2003, 8).

Music and the role of technology

Ethnomusicology and technology: an ambivalent relationship

The role and use of technology are fairly new fields of research in ethnomusicology. This seems surprising considering the fact that the history of the discipline itself is closely tied to technology and technological innovations. The introduction of Thomas Alva Edison’s phonograph in 1877 first enabled the conservation of sound and subsequently fostered the discipline of Comparative Musicology, ethnomusicology’s predecessor (Barz and Cooley 2008a, 8). Despite similar attempts,³ Edison’s machine was the first device actually capable of recording sound. A funnel-shaped horn collected the sounds and a stylus attached to a diaphragm, which registered the sound waves, then inscribed the groove on a tinfoil (and later on a wax-coated) cylinder. The stylus itself could also be used to translate the groove back into sound. The act of sound recording made sound portable and turned it into an object for further studies (Lysloff and Gay 2003, 3). The recordings served as a basis for transcription and analysis, which back then were at the heart of the discipline. This so-called ‘armchair analysis’ (Merriam 1964, 38–9) took place in a laboratory-like environment and often employed ‘universal schemes’, with the aim of tracing music’s evolution and origin or mapping cultural areas (Barz and Cooley 2008a, 8). Sound recording did not only facilitate the emergence of Comparative Musicology. It also gave rise to a rather paradoxical situation at whose heart lay the dichotomy of the ‘ethnic’ and the ‘Western’.⁴ Anthropology and Comparative Musicology portrayed its ‘others’ as spatially and temporarily different, a process that Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other (1983) terms ‘denial of coevalness’. In the context of nineteenth-century evolutionism, ‘ethnic’ music was thought to represent earlier stages of musical evolution. These ‘pure’ stages were thought to be threatened by the ‘contamination’ of Western influences, including technology, and had to be conserved and ‘frozen in time’ with the help of sound recording, which itself is a Western technology. Impacts of recording technology on the music itself were not reflected upon.

Assumptions of cultural imperialism gave rise to so-called salvage anthropology, whose aim was to save whatever was left to be saved. These attitudes can be found in German Comparative Musicology as well as in early ethnomusicology⁵ in the United States. Erich Moritz von Hornbostel expressed his concerns in his essay The Problems of Comparative Musicology, first published under the German title Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft (1905):

The danger is great that the rapid dissemination of European culture will destroy the remaining traces of ethnic singing and saying. We must save whatever can be saved before the airship is added to the automobile and the electric express train, and before we hear ‘tararabumdieh’ in all of Africa and, in the South Seas, the quaint song about little Kohn.

(von Hornbostel 1975, 207)

Similar concerns were also dominant in early music ethnography in the United States. Jonathan Sterne attests to the works of early American ethnomusicologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, such as Jesse Walter Fewkes, Alice Cunningham Fletcher and Frances Densmore, a similar ‘preservative ethos’ (Sterne 2003, 324; see also Barz and Cooley 2008a, 8–9). This is also visible in the fact that the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) sponsored field trips serving the purpose of sound preservation. To sum it up, technologies – among them sound recording and reproduction – gave rise to concerns, which themselves led to the application of recording technology to preserve what was thought to be ‘original’ and ‘pure’.

Technology did not only enable the seemingly objective preservation of sound. Recordings also fulfilled the needs for exoticism and the search for authenticity. In addition, the technologically privileged position of the ethnomusicologist served to establish ethnographic authority and it is only recently that ethnomusicologists no longer find themselves in a technologically privileged position (Lysloff and Gay 2003, 2–4). During my fieldwork, people introduced me to their recording practices, which often involved state of the art sound recording equipment and software. I frequently felt that it was me, the ethnomusicologist, who was in an inferior position. Technology is no longer simply a means for preserving sound and exerting ethnographic authority. It has itself become an ethnomusicological field.

The recording industry and technology: an inseparable connection

[W]ithout electronic technology, popular music in the twenty-first century is unthinkable.

(Théberge 2001, 3)

Technology’s ability to detach sound from musical performance and make it portable did not only contribute to the emergence of ethnomusicology. Sound recording and reproduction also constituted a precondition for the formation of the recording industry and signalled a new stage in the commodification of music.⁶ John Connell and Chris Gibson (2003) divide the development of music into a commodity in two stages, which were both fostered by technological innovations. In the first phase, the invention of printing and an increase in literacy gave rise to sheet music as a commodity. While in this case, representations of musical sound were commoditized, in the second phase actual sounds were turned into a product (Connell and Gibson 2003, 52). Michael Chanan stresses the importance of the phonograph in this context.

If at first the phonograph record was little more than a novelty, the stuff of entertainment arcades and ‘educational’ lectures, it was also an entirely novel commodity: it turned the performance of music into a material object, something you could hold in your hand, which could be bought and sold. The effects of this innovation were both economic and aesthetic, and emerged in stages, revealing different aspects in the process.

(Chanan 1995, 7)

Eventually it was not the phonograph but the gramophone which turned people into consumers of musical recordings (Taylor 2001, 5). While Edison’s cylinders were well-suited for recording (and accordingly lent themselves for the purposes of ethnomusicologists), Emile Berliner’s gramophone could not only reproduce sound but it had a striking advantage. Its shellac discs could be easily replicated, required less storage space and thus facilitated turning music into a large-scale commodity (Osborne 2012, 42–3). Detaching the musical sound from the performance also gave rise to neo-Marxist concerns of alienation. The manufacturing process itself provoked these connotations. The association of disc manufacture with assembly-line production and especially the automotive industry – Henry Ford’s Model T and Emile Berliner’s discs became prominent at around the same time – shaped the image of the recording industry. The connotations were transferred to the music itself, which is clearly visible in the writings of Theodor W. Adorno, who describes popular music as a standardized product of the culture industries in his article ‘On Popular Music’ (1941) (Adorno 1990 [1941], 70–1).

The phonograph as well as the gramophone and its shellac discs were first succeeded by vinyl records in the 1940s⁷ and later on by the cassette tape, launched by Philips in 1963 (Chanan 1995, 103; Drew 2014, 2; Katz 2010, 15). Cassettes were regarded as a complement or an alternative to vinyl and did not fully replace the previous format (see e.g. Manuel 1993, xiv). The history of magnetic recording dates back to 1898 and the idea of engineer Vladimir Poulsen to use magnetic wires for sound recording, but it was not until the 1920s and 1930s that magnetic tapes were developed and then commercially launched by BASF in 1934 (Chanan 1995, 96). The rather poor sound quality made further improvements necessary. Two decades later tapes finally gained popularity as a mastering medium in recording studios due to their reusability and their relatively low price. The new technology also enabled multi-track recording and laid the foundation for home recording. The impact was not restricted to the recording studio. The audiocassette facilitated market expansion and the emergence of a new sector of consumption that had not been tapped into by previous formats (Chanan 1995, 153). Lower costs of production and replication contributed to a democratization and decentralization of the recording industry. According to Peter Manuel, cassettes were especially successful in the so-called ‘developing world’ because ‘cassette tapes and cassette players are cheaper and more durable than records and turntables, and their power requirements are more easily met’ (Manuel 1993, xiv). As the first popular device that enabled easy duplication, cassette tapes also posed a threat to the recording industry, as the campaign ‘home-taping kills music’ shows (Drew 2014).

The shift to digital technologies and formats signalled a new stage in the field of music production and distribution. The CD, launched in 1983 by Sony and Philips (Théberge 2001, 18), generated high profits for the recording industry through the sale of back catalogues and also gave rise to a new dimension of piracy. However, the probably most severe change in industry structures was caused by non-physical formats, most prominently MPEG-1 Layer 3, commonly referred to as MP3. In 1987, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, who had been working on a compression format for the transmission of speech over phone lines since the 1970s, joined forces with the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) and developed the first real-time codec for high quality audio compression.⁸ Four years later Fraunhofer IIS released the audio codec that came to be known as MP3 (Fraunhofer IIS, The MP3 History).⁹ MP3 compression is a form of perceptual coding, utilizing ‘various characteristics of human auditory perception’ (Fraunhofer IIS, Technology). Easily perceived elements are represented in a very exact way, while less audible information is less precisely represented and information inaudible to the human ear is discarded (Fraunhofer IIS, Technology). The reduction of file size and, accordingly, of required storage space was an important factor for the success of the format....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Postface
• References
• Index