Music in the Marketplace

A social economics approach

Samuel Cameron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317934721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie des médias et des communications

Much recent economic work on the music industry has been focused on the impact of technology on demand, with predictions being made of digital copyright infringement leading to the demise of the industry. In fact, there have always been profound cyclical swings in music media sales owing to the fact that music always has been, and continues to be, a discretionary purchase.

This entertaining and accessible book offers an analysis of the production and consumption of music from a social economics approach. Locating music within the economic analysis of social behaviour, this books guides the reader through issues relating to production, supply, consumption and trends, wider considerations such as the international trade in music, and in particular through divisions of age, race and gender.

Providing an engaging overview of this fascinating topic, this book will be of interest and relevance to students and scholars of cultural economics, management, musicology, cultural studies and those with an interest in the music industry more generally.

1

INTRODUCTION

What is the opposite of music? Is it still music?

Let us start in a dialectical mode seldom found amongst the mainstream economists. It would be useful to define music before we discuss it. Academic studies of music tend to have very narrow terms of reference. Economists almost always discuss the demand for music even though other aspects of music would fall within the realm of conventional economics. Studies of music in cultural/media studies tend to focus on its social usage and circulation and its possible symbolic meaning. Hesmond-haulgh (2013) has lamented the tendency to overlook its important emotional role; but then everyone of a certain age knows the dictum of Noel Coward that it is strange how potent cheap music is.

It is not obvious that the study of emotional reactions to music is necessarily a study of music as such, as it may potentially be not significantly different in any way from emotional reactions to other cultural products like plays and books. If it is emotionally different from these this may, in some regards, be partly due to economic factors. Chiefly, it is the divisibility and separability of music that allows it to be consumed in fractions, and as background, to a greater degree than the above-mentioned categories. I shall return to this feature with some empirical data in the case study of Adele in the next chapter.

The ambient use of music has disturbed many in terms of moving music into thrall to the marketplace. This is very clearly stated in an interview with Stockhausen (Wire, 1995). He says

as soon as it becomes just a means for ambiance, as we say, environment, or for being used for certain purposes, then music becomes a whore, and one should not allow that really; one should not serve any existing demands or in particular not commercial values. That would be terrible: that is selling out the music.

It might seem that the definition of music is not very important for an economic approach as it might be considered to be whatever the producers and consumers say it is. Or, what government statisticians say it is. Once they give it a SIC (standard industrial classification) code and a formal name then that is the music industry. However a problem will tend to emerge when the welfare economics of so-called “market failure” is discussed for such things as television talent competitions. We then move into the sphere of old-world thinkers like Stockhausen and Adorno (2002) where “bad” or “not proper” music is driving out “good” music which needs special support to protect its fragile existence. Once we make such a move the “bad” music might be considered as ontologically not much different from “non-music” or “noise” in the sense in which it is used by the layperson. Chapter 3 deals with some works where non-economists are essentially using the “market failure” argument to rationalize the corruption of a form, which they venerate, into “non-” or “not proper” music.

A useful rhetorical strategy is to consider what might be the opposite of the thing to be defined. Is the opposite of music noise or is it silence? Or, is silence the opposite of both music and noise thereby making noise and music the same thing. Whichever of these it is, we should note there are likely to be some limitations in selling noise or silence widely in the marketplace.

Although we may note that in the increasingly noisy modern world, noise-cancelling headphones are literally selling people noise if they lead to an increase in costs.

Silence, like privacy, may be something which can be almost impossible to protect in the modern world. All music of course must contain some semblance of silence or it would be an incomprehensible blur with all the parts running together. The exception to this is the current vogue, on the internet, for creating “black midi” files using software to create musical performances with literally millions of notes being played. This is unlikely to appeal to the general listener and we should probably consider it a deviant case of anti-music made for frivolous purposes rather than any kind of polemic.

The ancient Japanese idea of ma says that music lives in constant dialogue with silence in the wider society. Thus the increased scarcity of silence in the general economy threatens the vitality of certain types of music. Some composers like Morton Feldman (and followers like English rock band Talk Talk) will argue that decisions about the placing and length of silence within a work are a crucial aspect of it. This would be a staple element also in discussion of jazz artists like Miles Davis. In more frenetic and populist music, like modern urban dance genres there will still be breaks where there appears to be no sound, even if it is only for a very small fraction of a second, but there is often still a very high level of sound/noise in terms of decibel measurements. In some cases, this will be due to the use of compression techniques to reduce the dynamic range of audio events to make them more palatable and possibly more exciting. This is the issue of the so-called “loudness wars” in modern music where the subtleties and finesse of music are being squashed out by sonic engineers and producers catering for mass markets. This is easier than ever as music is largely produced in the digital domain where little cost or effort is required to “squash” the mix of recorded music or even raise its level. These are arguments about music being noisy not that the music itself is noise. That is, that the music itself may still be “good” but is being ruined by a market-driven processing imperative similar to what happens to food ingredients as a few oligopolistic supermarkets take over the world. As with processed food, we find the argument that people become accustomed or even addicted to the overloud music. The market failure argument can also be applied to supposedly plain “bad” music as well as the ruination of good music.

One partial indication of the loss of value of silence in the modern world (because it is a “waste of time” in a harassed leisure universe) is the reduction in the length of gaps between tracks when older music, such as the Beatles, is repackaged.

Celebrated French thinker Jacques Attali’s book, Noise: The Political Economy of Music is almost universally praised. This may be due to it not having been read by those who would be horrified by its contents. This is not a book that I have seen discussed by an economist although Attali himself is considered to be an economist. Indeed one who advises the French government. Its central thesis is one that attaches a level of importance to the social position of music that would surprise many. The term “political economy” is one that is a long-running and possibly even increasing source of confusion. Political economy is what the subject we now know as “Economics” was originally called before it became formalized and professionalized.

Currently it has a number of usages. Sometimes it is the term applied to discussion of economic matters by academics who are not themselves economists. Elsewhere it is symptomatic of attempts to spice up economics by making it more relevant or interdisciplinary. Just now there seems to be a vogue for calling works “cultural political economy”. Confusingly, a lot of writings on political economy do not necessarily have anything to do with politics in the normal sense of the word.

The back cover of the 2011 printing of the Attali book contains this comment from Ethnomusicology (emphasis added):

For Attali, music is not simply a reflection of culture, but a harbinger of change, an anticipatory abstraction of the shape of things to come. The book’s title refers specifically to the reception of musics that sonically rival normative orders.

This quote follows Attali as the normative orders referred to are not canons of music creation but normative orders in the world. Thus like 1960s hippies, Sun Ra, early rap artists and British punks, Attali might be seen as thinking that music can change the world. It would seem that he and his aficionados, do not perhaps go that far as it is only a harbinger of change.

We might be inclined to say: so what? Why do we need a harbinger of social and political change? In terms of the marketplace for music, harbingers could be very useful as they may enable culturally minded entrepreneurs to make money by using the cutting edge of musical styles as a forecasting device for incoming shifts in consumer tastes not just for music but for whole lifestyles.

We ought to have a theory of why harbinger properties might be found in musical evolution. There are some obvious propositions that could be explored as follows:

• Creative musical people tend to be younger and more in touch with the zeitgeist.

• They may be more intuitive than others and thus pick up non-quantitative information.

• All musical work involves some degree of abstraction and removal from literary modes of thought and this may generate insights into incoming change.

• Creative musical people might be seen as living outside the conventional market world of mundane work existence and thus be able to see more clearly than those that are trapped within it.

These may also apply to film makers or other visual artists but music perhaps has the advantage of being a means whereby, historically, more people can be reached for less effort.

This might explain why (see Chapter 8) Pussy Riot are discussed under the heading of music despite the fact that their music itself is not discussed. Ubiquity of movement of music can account for some people, who are not necessarily that musically inclined, moving their art work into the musical sphere for either anarchistic or more focused political ends.

The itemized list above is premised mainly on some kind of “outsider” status and a degree of opposition to the marketplace. However, success brings the musician more into the discipline of the marketplace as Stockhausen laments. We may then envisage a long-run equilibrium where music simply becomes a product of the current normative order rather than a challenge to it or harbinger of change. Looking at 1960s protest “folk” music we can see this in such things as the promulgation of the early works of Sonny and Cher and Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” as a sanitization of the works of Bob Dylan. Less musically stark (than Dylan) songwriting protesters The Third Rail unleashed an attack on consumerism in “Run Run Run” in 1967 and proceeded to end up writing advertising music. The ubiquitous co-opting of all sorts of music, into commercial advertising, represents an apex of market emasculation of the supposed outsider status. The noise has become the sound of the mainstream. The scene in the biopic of the Doors, based on Jim Morrison’s anger at “Light my Fire” (seen as a counter-culture anthem) possibly being used in a Buick commercial now seems rather quaint. Nonetheless, an approach by another car firm, in 2003, led to a feud between the surviving Doors as one of them (Densmore) objected to ruthless economic exploitation of the band’s name and songs as capital assets.

After the UK punk explosion we saw corporate encouragement of vague “Generation X” products like the hybridized sneer of Billy Idol. Attali generally would seem to be sympathetic to the idea that such marketization has removed the subversive power of music to be “noise” in his sense.

Attali’s use of the term noise, however, is confusing and not really integrated into the “marketization leading to loss of essence” argument. In general, his use of the term noise is not in terms of acoustic theory, or even in terms of musicians who have sought to create theories and practices of “noise” music, although Attali confusingly provides brief historical accounts of both of these in his preamble. Rather, noise represents the derogation of revolutionary musical forms, by the established order, in the sense that they are not “proper” music. It might follow from the idea that noise is revolutionary that the opposite concept of silence might be equally revolutionary.

Silence as a form of music is obviously a somewhat limited career option for the consumer and equally restrictive for the listener. The only notable proponent of silence as a strategy of production is the American composer John Cage. In his case, this is done purely for polemical purposes (akin to visual artists presenting all one colour canvasses) and without any intent of being a viable long-term method. For consumption, the only notable proponent of a strategy of silent consumption is UK maverick anarchist Bill Drumond (formerly of the KLF).

This is discussed further in Chapter 3. Both Cage and Drummond are effectively concerned with the problem of satiation due to there being too much music and too little “real” listening as opposed to merely ambient and casual hearing. John Cage’s “4 Minutes, 33 Seconds” is by now an easy source of rather tedious humour. His serious point was about the difference between simply hearing and actively listening to a subject on which there is (not surprisingly) much literature. There is also a belated ironic relevance to the issue of copyright to be found in the Mike Batt case. Supposedly Cage sued Batt for infringing his copyright of the silence. In 2010 Batt claimed on Twitter that this whole story had been a prefabricated scam done for amusement.

It seems darkly amusing that we could have a case of someone trying to copyright silence during an era of artist and corporate panic over the difficulties of copyrighting works of art and entertainment (or as we shall have to call them “intellectual property”) which have got actual content.

In 2014, Michigan band Vulfpeck released a silent album Sleepify in order to extract money from Spotify. They made reportedly $20,000+, from over five million plays, before the entry was removed without explanation. There were ten tracks of 31 or 32 seconds which their hardcore fans left on streaming while they slept. This was an organized campaign to raise money to go on tour and some free shows were offered to fans as reward. Spotify only paid $0.0007 royalty per play meaning large numbers of plays are needed to generate much revenue. The length of tracks was chosen to be just enough to qualify for payment. Commentary on this has failed to point out that surely the silence element is irrelevant. The loyal fans could have slept and streamed short pieces of music with the volume turned down. Skoff (2014) sees the whole scam as indicative of the future scope for fan power to correct market failure which is penalizing the truly talented musicians due to a poor reward system.

The elements of music

So, if music is not in a state of crisis then it will be something that is not the opposite of noise or silence but what distinguishes it from other things? The obvious quality is sound. A painting by Picasso does not make a sound unless otherwise manipulated. It is thus “art” not music. But, galleries exhibit art installations which do have sonic content but are not deemed to be music and we find practitioners in “sound installation” which implies they are not musicians as such.

Music in the general sense may be conveniently divided into that which is performed and that which is recorded. Clearly this distinction is somewhat fluid. The majority of live performances now contain many recorded elements such as sampled parts and samples played in a musical style. In particular live percussion on traditional acoustic instruments has to be supplemented by additional triggered electronic (sampled or modelled) sounds or audiences will not be happy with the result. This is particularly the case where the live experience is required to reproduce the major elements of the recorded version.

In the rest of this section, I provide a distillation of the elements of music as catalogued over time in various musicological, psychological and other writings. I do not give chapter and verse for each aspect although one may refer to books on the psychology of the appreciation of music. Later, in Chapter 6, I discuss how these aspects can be more formally incorporated in mainstream economic analysis in terms of Lancaster goods characteristics model of utility. It i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Adele-o-nomics
• 3 The never ending death of music
• 4 Does anyone know anything about anything?
• 5 The production and supply of music
• 6 Consumption of music
• 7 Age
• 8 Gender
• 9 Race and ethnicity
• 10 International trade
• 11 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of musical persons and entities
• Index