There Is No Music Industry

Abstract

The locution "music industry" still too often refers to a single subset of profit-making practices in music: record labels and the activities around them. Media scholars are partly to blame, as they continue to define record labels, and especially labels that are part of conglomerates, in this way. Yet this notion of the production and sale of recordings as the basis of "the music industry" is hardly a part that represents the whole. Drawing on the work of Christopher Small and others who have decentered the musical text as the basis of music criticism, I argue that media industries scholars must do the same, opening up our inquiries to a wide range of music industries; that is, industries whose activities directly affect the performance, production, circulation, consumption, recirculation, appropriation, and enjoyment of music today. Opening the term up in this way will allow us to develop more robust and coherent social accounts of music as a media practice, and provide a stronger empirical basis for criticizing current institutional arrangements and proposing new, more just and convivial alternatives.

Rising tides? Data capture, platform accumulation, and new monopolies in the digital music economy

“…Record companies exercised considerable control over the production and circulation of music due to the centrality of the studio album. The tendency to equate music with the sound recording is evident in the commonplace use of the term ‘music industry’ (in the singular) as a synonym for the recording industry, thereby obscuring the involvement of a much wider set of industries (see Sterne, 2014; Williamson and Cloonan, 2007). The entrance of the IT sector into the music industries has lent yet more complexity to an already complex matrix of interests.…”

“…The entrance of the IT sector into the music industries has lent yet more complexity to an already complex matrix of interests. While mindful of the problem of perpetuating the ‘monetization-of-recordings construct’ (Sterne, 2014: 50), the business experiments of interest here have been driven precisely by the attempt to monetize digital recordings.…”

Composing the Context: Considerations on materially mediated electronic musicianship

“…The issue can also be viewed from the perspective of mediality – the relation of form and matter in music. Sterne suggests that studying music’s mediality in the contemporary context involves viewing technology as a social phenomenon, as well as considering ‘plural materialities’ and ‘differential embodiments’ in the construction of the research object (Sterne 2014). This view effectively mirrors the complexity and plurality of a practice at the interface of the digital, the material and the human.…”

Close reading big data: The Echo Nest and the production of (rotten) music metadata

“…The influence of metadata in contemporary digital music distribution is calling for a need to once again re-think how we conceptualize musical artifacts. Metadata is deeply involved in producing musical experiences and making music happen (in similar ways as electronic devices, Internet providers, roadies, and concert ticket salesmen are; see Sterne, 2014;Small, 1998). In doing so, metadata and its managers are erasing distinctions between sounds and information; divisions between content, and intelligence about contents.…”