Popular Music as Promotion

Music and Branding in the Digital Age

Leslie M. Meier

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780745692258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

'Business-as-usual' has been transformed across the music industries in the post-CD age. Against widespread hype about the purported decline of the major music labels, this book provides a critique of the ways these companies have successfully adapted to digital challenges – and what is at stake for music makers and for culture.

Today, recording artists are positioned as 'artist-brands' and popular music as a product to be licensed by consumer and media brands. Leslie M. Meier examines key consequences of shifting business models, marketing strategies, and the new 'common sense' in the music industries: the gatekeeping and colonization of popular music by brands.

Popular Music as Promotion is important reading for students and scholars of media and communication studies, cultural studies and sociology, and will appeal to anyone interested in new intersections of popular music, digital media and promotional culture.

1
From Commodities to Commercials? The Rise of Promotion in the Music Industries

Under capitalism, corporations produce popular music as a commodity in order to generate profits – a logic inherent to this economic system. In the twenty-first century, we have seen the introduction of a host of new music-related products and services in addition to the more customary complement of records, concerts and traditional merchandise (T-shirts, souvenirs). The music marketplace has been flooded by: digital downloads available for purchase from online digital media stores (e.g. Apple iTunes, Google Play); music streaming services (e.g. Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music); video streaming sites (e.g. YouTube, Vevo); music-based talent shows (e.g. American Idol, The Voice); and artist-branded merchandise ranging from perfumes to karaoke ‘apps’. Furthermore, pre-existing popular songs are woven throughout television programmes, films, advertisements and video games. Popular music is not only positioned as a consumer good sold to listeners, but also as intellectual property to be monetized more widely through the pursuit of various sponsorship, endorsement, branding and licensing deals. The observation that popular music is produced as a commodity within this industrial system, then, is hardly groundbreaking.

To liken popular music to promotion is perhaps a more contentious move. While each of the above examples may be characterized as commodities, not all abide by the same business logics: there is a meaningful distinction to be made between those products sold by businesses to end customers (B2C) and those that involve transactions in the business-to-business (B2B) market. Branding and licensing agreements with media and consumer brand partners – the focus of this book – belong to the latter category. Importantly, these business arrangements generate income for copyright owners and allow partnering brands to use popular music as a promotional instrument.

In order to set the stage for my examination of the expansion of music-related branding and licensing practices, this chapter establishes the intellectual and historical context that frames my understanding of the commodification of culture as an historical process. To begin, I examine key critiques of capitalist cultural production found in critical theory and critical political economy, beginning with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's ‘culture industry’ thesis, and then turning to the response provided by the ‘cultural industries’ approach inaugurated by Bernard Miège (1989) and Nicholas Garnham (1990) and extended by David Hesmondhalgh (2013a). The chapter then traces the emergence of popular music as a device for cross-promotion back to its industrial origins. After first considering music's early commodity forms and precedents for its promotional use beginning in the nineteenth century, I discuss key twentieth-century developments in the evolving relationship between popular music, advertising and mass media. I understand music-related branding and licensing practices as marking an intensification of these earlier industrial and commercial forms.

Popular Music as Commodity, Culture as Industry: Critical Theory and Cultural Production

What does it mean to describe something as a commodity? In Karl Marx's formulation, commodities meet certain human needs – they contain a ‘use value’ (a qualitative factor) – but, crucially, are produced for the purpose of exchange: ‘exchange value’ (a quantitative factor) drives capitalist production (Marx [1867] 1990: 125–31). As Hesmondhalgh points out, ‘At its most basic level, [commodification] involves producing things not only for use but also for exchange’ (Hesmondhalgh 2013a: 69; emphasis in original). While the extension of exchange relations throughout the spheres of communication and culture may now be widely acknowledged as the default reality, the consequences of the industrialization and commodification of symbolic and expressive forms have long been debated. Within cultural and social theory, a foundational but disputed account of the constraints and detrimental effects that accompany the treatment of culture as value-generating property came in the form of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's ‘culture industry’ thesis. These German-Jewish philosophers, originators of the ‘critical theory’ of society initiated at the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt, presciently claimed that ‘[a]dvertising and the culture industry are merging technically no less than economically’ (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2002: 133). The culture industry thesis raises serious questions about the nature of capitalism and freedom, art and entertainment that continue to resonate today.

When Horkheimer and Adorno introduced their culture industry thesis in one of the Frankfurt School's defining texts, Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1944] 2002), the pairing of the terms ‘culture’ and ‘industry’ was polemical and intended to shock. According to this Marxian critique, the capitalist social relations and instrumental rationality that underpin commodity production had invaded what ostensibly had been autonomous from such forces: culture had been commodified. As objects of exchange and commercial calculation, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, ‘the irreconcilable elements of culture, art, and amusement have been subjected equally to the concept of purpose and thus brought under a single false denominator: the totality of the culture industry’ (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2002: 108). From the perspective of private media corporations, the purpose of culture was to produce profits; the drive to generate a healthy return on investment was foundational to commercial interest in cultural production. As Shane Gunster sums up, ‘the culture industry thesis strives to answer two questions: What specific properties does culture develop when it is produced and sold as a commodity? And what must human beings become in order to maximize the meaning and pleasure taken from cultural commodities?’ (Gunster 2004: 10).

The culture industry thesis unfolds from Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the self-destruction of enlightenment. Dialectic of Enlightenment and Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason were born of a specific historical moment and the atrocities that era witnessed: the terror of National Socialism (Nazism) and the Holocaust. Horkheimer and Adorno conceptualize the rise of fascism and genocide in relation to a wider ‘prognosis regarding the associated lapse from enlightenment into positivism’ and ‘the identity of intelligence and hostility’ (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2002: xii). After fleeing Germany for the United States, they developed a critique of American capitalist democracy and the role of mass media therein, identifying parallels between the modes of thinking dominant in the German and American contexts. Horkheimer and Adorno examine the dialectic of domination that had accompanied the progression of ‘rational’ thought in the modern era and conclude that capitalism had facilitated the formalization of instrumental reason. There had been a shift from ‘objective reason’, which is concerned with ends, to ‘subjective reason’, whose focus is on means – on ‘serv[ing] the subject's interest’ (Horkheimer [1947] 2004: 3–4). When self-interest becomes the basis for orienting and exercising reason, reason itself becomes an instrument (Horkheimer [1947] 2004: 14). Used solely in this way, rational thought can produce and problematically justify fundamentally irrational outcomes. As J.M. Bernstein explains, however, ‘the key to instrumental reason is not means-end logic, but the primacy of the abstract over the concrete, the universal over the particular’ (Bernstein 2001: 239 n. 3).

Horkheimer and Adorno's critique is rooted in the ways that the particular and the universal are treated as commensurate under ‘identitarian thinking’ or ‘identity thinking’. They argue that the subsumption of diverse objects under abstract concepts works to highlight sameness at the expense of difference, as the singular and unique is problematically rendered equivalent to some universal that it is imagined to represent: ‘cognition of non-identity … seeks to say what something is, while identitarian thinking says what something comes under, what it exemplifies or represents, and what, accordingly, it is not itself’ (Adorno [1966] 1973: 149). Identitarian thinking fails to account for the ‘remainder’ – what is unique to the individual and is not captured by the concept used to represent it. That which is ‘other’ and incommensurable is nevertheless assimilated, which can have deeply troubling consequences. This mode of thinking can reinforce stereotypes, for instance, and produce hostility to difference (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2002: 172).

The capitalist principle of exchange is the paradigmatic form of this type of ‘thinking in equivalents’. The commodity form is a powerful force of rationalization; its social relations work to assimilate difference. The culture industry thesis argues that culture is no longer exempt from these forces of rationalization and homogenization: ‘The conspicuous unity of macrocosm and microcosm confronts human beings with a model of their culture: the false identity of universal and particular. All mass culture under monopoly is identical’ (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2002: 95). Horkheimer and Adorno do not use the term identical here to suggest that cultural commodities are exactly alike in terms of content (though they do assert that the effects of processes of standardization are evident). Rather, they argue that as commodities, different cultural products and practices are treated as equivalent regardless of their content; they are rendered commensurate by virtue of their exchangeability on the market. As a commodity, ‘culture – no matter what form it takes – is to be measured by norms not inherent to it and which have nothing to do with the quality of the object, but rather with some type of abstract standards imposed from without’ (Adorno [1960] 2001a: 113).

Horkheimer and Adorno's term ‘culture industry’ signals the processes of standardization, rationalization, homogenization and massification they see as inherent to commodified culture. In the United States, by the 1940s a relatively small number of publishing, film, music and radio companies had assumed an inordinate amount of control over which cultural commodities were produced, how widely they were distributed and how aggressively they were promoted – decisions made based on the profit motive. A star system was a key aspect of the culture industry apparatus: the production of fame was central to the generation of profits. Horkheimer and Adorno considered the ‘controlled manner’ in which the culture industry's products were assembled to be ‘factory-like’ (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2002: 132). Taken together, this culture industry was ‘infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system’ (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2002: 94). Adorno, a musician and composer with tremendously demanding expectations regarding the autonomy and critical orientation of art, dedicated considerable criticism to the purportedly standardized and formulaic character of popular music in particular – ‘light’ music he saw as driven by essentially substitutable details and hooks (Adorno [1941] 2002b).

Adorno asserted that an industrial approach to cultural production is particularly worrying because culture's critical potential had resided precisely in the individual artwork's singularity: ‘Culture is the perennial claim of the particular over the general, as long as the latter remains unreconciled to the former’ (Adorno [1960] 2001a: 113). He acknowledged that art had been subordinated to powerful interests even before the development of capitalism (e.g. the Church, nobility) (Adorno [1959] 1993: 20), but claimed that the shift from aristocratic patronage to market mechanisms during the bourgeois era had offered a brief window during which it was possible for artists and composers to achieve unusual degrees of autonomy and independence from society and its institutions. Aspirations to autonomy, understood as ‘[i]ndependence or freedom from external control or influence’ (Hesmondhalgh 2013a: 414), remain a central feature of cultural work and the power relations underpinning the cultural industries today (see Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011). The profit motive leads to the channelling of symbolic expression toward commercial objectives – corporations pursue sound investments – but, importantly, this system does not snuff out creative freedom altogether. Creativity is essential for the production of ever-new cultural commodities.

The culture industry favours those cultural commodities that will ‘sell themselves’, however, which means that marketing and promotional considerations do not simply take effect after cultural commodities are already produced. Instead, the primacy of marketability directly informs the types of content and the specific productions in which companies decide to invest in the first place. As Andrew Wernick suggests, ‘implicit in Horkheimer and Adorno's account, though they do not consider it as an independent factor, is that one of the ways in which commodification has been a culturally homogenizing force is through the similar ways in which … the products of the culture industry present themselves to us as objects and sites of a promotional practice. … The marketing imperative feeds back into their actual construction’ (Wernick 1991: 187). This dynamic places finite limits on cultural expression (many ideas and works are seen as unsuitable for financial support), thereby influencing the act of creation itself. Within the music industries, this commercial logic influences which recording ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Popular Music, Branding and Promotional Culture
• 1: From Commodities to Commercials? The Rise of Promotion in the Music Industries
• 2: Capitalizing on Music: From Sound Recordings to ‘Artist-brands’
• 3: Brands: The New Gatekeepers
• 4: ‘Flexible’ Capitalism and Popular Music: Branding Culture, Designing ‘Difference’
• 5: Conclusions
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement