When Jay Z rapped, “I’m not a businessman / I’m a business, man” he wasn’t entirely boasting. His wife’s most recent takeover of the world with the release of Lemonade underscores how securely joined at the hip music and commerce have become. We all know that on at least a superficial level, but we seldom ponder what that actually means. That’s why Timothy Taylor’s work is valuable.
Taylor comes at it from two perspectives: he’s a working musician, and he’s a professor of musicology at UCLA. So it should be no surprise that when he looks at the structure and functioning of the music industry, he’s got a variety of perspectives at his disposal. His previous books have explored how music became an industry, and how the industry turned around to affect music.
His latest, Music and Capitalism, provides some theoretical background for understanding the nature of the industry. But instead of focusing on blockbuster megastars like Mr. and Mrs. Carter, Taylor introduces us to artists on the fringes of the business, whose next work will likely not be premiered on HBO.
But first, there’s Theodor Adorno, the philosopher and theorist who wrote frequently about the dangers of commodifying music. Taylor, in pointing out the relative paucity of post-Adorno studies about the subject, takes him to task for not fully considering both sides of that coin. “There are plenty of musicians who want their music to be commodified simply so they can make a living,” writes Taylor, “and it would be difficult for someone with a stable job to criticize them for that.” He then proceeds to chart the history of that commodification within the capitalist structure. This is one of the few music books you’ll encounter anytime soon that quotes Marx and Engles — a lot.
The early part of Music and Capitalism is an alternative telling of the history of the music industry, more from the prism of capitalism (as much a social structure as an economic one, Taylor asserts) than from that of art or technology. In this telling, the work of musicians is as often as not referred to as labor; some of them probably thought they were simply making art.
Taylor details business trends and imperatives that shaped how we receive and consume music, from re-defining the place of artists in society to showing how marketers used music to define and reach new batches of consumers. Some of this won’t be news to readers already familiar with the birth of the American music industry, but Taylor’s perspective on it is no less insightful, or sobering.
It gets even more sobering as Taylor moves on to consider how musicians navigate the industry capitalism has wrought. We meet composers who worked in film and advertising, and have seen their income slashed thanks to technology and an increasing emphasis on efficiency as a means to profit. He centers his chapter on globalization and music with an extended look at the career of Angelique Kidjo, a star in the “world music” genre that she has alternately eschewed and embraced over the years. And he looks at indie musicians and enterprises making their way in the margins, such as the low-fi label Burger Records.
Good that he did that, because the rest of the news he brings doesn’t lend to rosy thoughts about the future of music, and musicians. Rising income inequality isn’t going to make that future any easier. The independence that the digital environment promises musicians, Taylor surmises, actually means they’ll have to work a lot harder to achieve any significant level of notoriety and income than they might have had to before.
Well-read observers of the current music industry already know a lot of Taylor’s key points about the business. Poptimists might even think he’s a bit of a killjoy, by bringing us to think about the economic structure that governs how music reaches audiences. But Taylor convincingly argues we can’t properly look at music in a vacuum that doesn’t consider economics, and provides a framework for understanding the big pictures and unseen hands driving the industry and the people who work within it. Nowadays, like it or not, they’re all businesses, man.