Themes of My Work
CAPITALISM
MUSIC AND THE LOGIC OF BUSINESS EXCERPT from Selling Sounds
“Where is the song before it is sung?” asked the Russian writer Alexander Herzen. Nowhere, was his wistful answer. But then Herzen, who died in 1870, did not live in the age of the modern music industry, when songwriting and music publishing became complex commercial enterprises. In the decades following the U.S. Civil War, a new musical product transformed American musical culture. It was amusing, inexpensive, portable, and versatile enough to be enjoyed everywhere from baseball games and street corners to private middle-class parlors. This product was the popular song, and its advent marked the beginning of a new era in the political economy of music, by refashioning one of the most basic and universal forms of cultural expression— the song—according to the inexorable logic of business.
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“Popular” song did exist before this time, but earlier it had referred in a general way to vernacular music. Popular song resembled folk song, in today’s parlance—“an outgrowth from the life of the people,” as one survey of American music from 1890 put it. In the 1890s, however, popular song was rede fined as a new kind of aural commodity, unapologetically commercial and distinctively American, heard more and more widely across the soundscape. Other song forms—art song, religious song, work song—did not disappear completely, but popular song became the cornerstone of a broad new musical culture, initiating changes not just in the music people made and heard, but also in the way music was woven into the fabric of people’s lives. Popular song was a consumer commodity for the ear. Musically, it constituted an elastic, mutable category, containing at any given moment numerous styles and genres, which themselves changed over time. Commercially, it flowed from the processes of industrial manufacturing and marketing, the most successful products of which were deceptively simple, capable of appealing to people of different classes, ethnicities, and regions. Popular music was a national phenomenon, and its sounds accompanied a broad cultural shift in American society.
COMMODIFICATION EXCERPT FROM SELLING SOUNDS
In our own times it has become fashionable to declare that music has become a commodity. Like many truisms, this claim obscures as much as it reveals. It tells us nothing, for example, about how music resembles or differs from other commodities, or what aspect of music lies at the core of its commercial circulation. Does its value as a commodity inhere in the composition, the performance, or the sounds, or in some combination of these? To say merely that music is now a commodity tells us nothing about how, when, or why it became one, whether all music commodities function alike, or whether music that functions as a commodity at one moment is always so, uniformly. Commodification is not an instantaneous occurrence, like the flash pasteurization of milk. It is a social and political process, populated by human actors, and one that includes various dimensions and phases. To understand what music commodities are and how they operate, we need to revisit the period when the wheels of commercial music began to turn.