Decomposed: a political ecology of music

Abstract

IntroductionModern development, consumption and waste have strained the environment to the point of crisis -and music is part of the problem. Consider the poisonous petrochemicals used to manufacture LPs, the non-biodegradable plastics in CDs, the energy-guzzling server farms that power streaming MP3s, and the toxic graveyards of obsolete consumer electronics around the world. But these earthy and potentially ugly material realities typically go unnoticed in musical discourse, probably because they clash with a longstanding but mistaken belief that music is somehow an immaterial phenomenon.Indeed, even though we are accustomed to the accusation that certain types of music are 'disposable', we rarely think about what happens to recordings when they are actually disposed of. And while commonsense tells us that the 'music industry' is in the business of making records, we rarely think about what those recordings are actually made of. Correspondingly, the environmental impact of recorded sound is almost completely 2 unaccounted for in cultural studies of music and media, which treat the musical commodity principally as a product of musical labour, an object of capitalist exchange, or a text for audience consumption. Questions about the actual material composition and decomposition of the musical commodity -about what happens to music before production and after consumption -have been largely ignored. Yet without confronting the relationship between music's cultural and economic value, on the one hand, and its environmental cost, on the other, the field of music studies forfeits the opportunity for a fully interdisciplinary engagement with -and a holistic democratic ethics of -its object of study. One step toward achieving that goal is to formulate a political ecology of the evolving relationship between popular music and sound technology since 1900.This article inscribes a history of recorded music in three main forms of materiality:shellac (1900-1950), plastic (1950-2000) and data (2000-present). These three broad phases in the material history of recorded music correspond to this article's three main sections. They also encompass the five most prevalent recording formats since 1900: 78s (shellac); LPs, cassettes and CDs (plastic); and MP3s (data). I subject these three materials to a double-headed investigation, examining the dynamics of manufacture and obsolescence that mark the shifts between them. As a backdrop to the sections on shellac,

The editorial playlist as container technology: on Spotify and the logistical role of digital music packages

“…Each of these musical containers has brought with them specific material affordances that have affected the ability for music to move and markets to develop. For instance, early sound recordings made of beeswax ran the risk of melting if exposed to heat, while early vulcanite rubber records were sensitive to twists and bends (Devine 2015). This affected the pricing of music, as well as the ease with which recorded sounds were distributed, bought, and sold.…”

The cost of music

“…Indeed, it is an irony that many of the fans who are invested in the nostalgia and romance of the so-called vinyl revival are also (anecdotally) those who seem most likely to drive electric cars or to ride bicycles, perhaps also to buy organic food and to choose a vegetarian lifestyle. (Of course, this contradiction makes sense as an expression of the paradoxical anti-commercialism that has been expressed through the mass medium of rock 7 What follows is an extremely condensed sketch of issues covered in much more depth in Devine (2019).…”

Popular Music and the Anthropocene

“…And here, the age-old debates on the respective qualities and shortcomings of analogue and digital technology are no longer really relevant. Although vinyl records are made from petroleum-based PVC (Smith 2015;Devine 2015), digital tools and networks are also great polluters (Fuller 2005;Slade 2006;Gabrys 2011;Flippo et al 2013;Cubitt 2017;Dubey and De Jouvancourt 2018;Brennan and Devine 2019;Wolf 2019). In short, it seems clear that MDE, Coldplay and Massive Attack have accepted the idea that the entire infrastructure of professional music is problematic, whereas until now, as in many other sectors, it was just the public that was required to take action.…”