New Perspectives for Use-Values? For a More Complex Understanding of Digital Labour (original) (raw)
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Political economy of music in the digital age
๐ผ๐๐ก๐๐๐๐๐ก๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ ๐๐ฃ๐๐๐ค ๐๐ ๐ผ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ก๐๐๐ ๐ธ๐กโ๐๐๐ (Canada), University of Alberta, vol. 33, no. 1, 2024
This paper seeks to unravel and understand the conditions and ways in which cultural capitalism operates that drive its production, exchange, distribution and consumption in the digital age; as well as understanding the powers that hold it and those it serves, the circuits in which it is heard, the spaces in which it is prohibited, its context and historical transformations. Music as an artistic production and symbolic object has always been linked to its characteristic instruments and technologies of its time. But when the economy catches up with it and it becomes merchandise, other means and channels are put into play for its dissemination, storage and control. It seeks to demonstrate those stealthy operations with which intermediaries operate. An analysis is made regarding the logic of consumption and production of users, on power relations and asymmetries between some actors in the music industry.
Information, Communication & Society, 2017
This article examines a striking but under-analysed feature of culture under capitalism, using the example of music: that the main ways in which people gain access to cultural experiences are subject to frequent, radical and disorienting shifts. It has two main aims. The first is to provide a macro-historical, multi-causal explanation of changes in technologies of musical consumption, emphasising the mutual imbrication of the economic interests of corporations with sociocultural transformations. We identify a shift over the last twenty years from consumer electronics (CE) to information technology (IT) as the most powerful sectoral force shaping how music and culture are mediated and experienced, and argue that this shift from CE to IT drew upon, and in turn quickened, a shift from domestic consumption to personalised, mobile and connected consumption, and from dynamics of what Raymond Williams called 'mobile privatisation' to what we call 'networked mobile personalisation'. The second aim is to assess change and continuity in the main means by which recorded music is consumed, in long-term perspective. We argue that disruptions caused by recent 'digitalisation' of music are consistent with longer term processes, whereby music has been something of a testing ground for the introduction of new cultural technologies. But we also recognise particularly high levels of disruption in recent times and relate these to the new dominance of the IT industries, and the particular dynamism or instability of that sector. We close by discussing the degree to which constant changes in how people access musical experiences might be read as instances of capitalism's tendency to prioritise limiting notions of consumer preference over meaningful needs.
This chapter is concerned with copyright and music. Its stress on the material geographies and practice challenges the norms of debate that have been dominated by concern with the immaterial and the virtual. The chapter argues that such conceptual and practical focus on de-materialization has obscured, or distracted, analyses to such an extent that it has rendered invisible the geographical. Not surprisingly debates have been dazzled by technological changes, to the extent that they have โ erroneously โ displaced other concerns. The premature announcement of the โdeath of distanceโ being a case in point. The chapter argues for the need to turn our attention on the social and spatial embedding of musical practice if we are to fully comprehend its emergent forms in the โdigital age.โ This chapter is positioned against the notion of a โdigital age : a term that is associated with teleological theories of development. Moreover, it is a term that has deep roots in the writings of conservative futurists (Bell 1973, Toffler 1980), and much of the contemporary โtechnology commentariatโ spun out from Wired magazine (Kelly 1998). A telling critical exposition of such writing can be found in the exploration of the โCalifornian Ideologyโ (Barbrook and Cameron 1995).
2012
This article aims to contribute to a greater understanding of the development of new opportunities for the creation of value within the music economy. The underlyโ ing proposition is that the current transformation of recorded music culture into a networked onโdemand music culture, one where new digital networked media alโ low more artists and consumers to act as producers, distributers, publishers, critics etc. is comparable to previous fundamental transformations where new media beโ came the dominant means of production, allocation, perception and use of music. The concluding part of article examines how the new media impacted and chalโ lenged the music business' economic value chain.
From Music Scenes to Musicalized Networks : A Critical Perspective on Digitalization
From Music Scenes to Musicalized Networks : A Critical Perspective on Digitalization, 2020
Several notions have been developed in research currents studying popular music, to examine the geographic, social and economic dimensions of musical facts and their dynamics. These notions were jointly developed and mobilized by French and English-speaking researchers from cultural studies, political economy (or socio-economics of cultural industries), and the sociology of arts and culture. This article considers the possible divergences and articulations between three of these notions, the scene, the proto-market and the musicalized network, and discusses their respective heuristic potentials. Based on the example of musicians from various parts of France and the United Kingdom, we seek to show just how useful these notions can be to study the modalities of development of music projects, particularly to examine the musiciansโ construction of the symbolic and economic value of their musical activities.