The state of the music industry pt3: The effects of hypercommercialism, mass media and anti-cultural policy

3(a) Audience, media and the vicious circle of hypercommercialism


‘Good songs, bad songs, good singers and bad singers, good groups and bad groups, there is no such thing in the music business. Quality is not to be confused with commercial acceptability. The fact that a great song or an artist will command a public of its own and will have meaning to society is highly important to American culture, but it has nothing to do with the music business.’ - Bill Randle (eminent American DJ, lawyer and university professor)

Media-led and industry-controlled hyper commercialization change the form of musical culture, which, absorbed by consumers, produces a vicious circle of increasing commerciality and increasing acceptance of it. Music’s power to perform its cultural functions is then diminished, as assembled music cannot achieve the same articulatory power as organic musical form.
Music has cultural function beyond entertainment value, and can satisfy social needs, but such needs are best met by music springing from spontaneous expression. As previously stated, such music can be appropriated by the industry, yet cannot be created by it. The industry and society both need music with cultural function to flourish. Culture, society and the industry affect each other in a dialectical and circular manner.
Culturally articulate music has transformative potential, with its uniquely potent ability to symbolize and evoke both the emotional and somatically experienced dimensions of people's lives. It can function as a form of social cement. This emotional intensity facilitates affective and emotional alliances where assumptions of social position and feeling can be subverted and, in author Simon Frith’s words ‘express the way we would like to be, not what we are’, allowing for both ‘the fantasy of community and the enactment of it. Thus music’s crucial capacity for political articulation, and its employment in socially emancipative causes. Ethnic groups, gay communities and youth subcultures have all used music in this way. Although the music industry financially benefits from this, such music performs this articulatory function in a non-economic realm, in the absence of a financially – concerned bottom line. Music has proven itself capable of encoding and communicating quite specific cultural meanings, which in turn has empowered it to empower cultural/political movements by articulating subjectivities –often across cultures. For example, black American music, from gospel, to the blues, to Jazz, Soul and Funk all contributed to communicate black experience and intercultural conversation based on a politics of fulfilment. Bob Marley’s ‘Get up, Stand up’ and Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’ both performed a similar function in a more explicitly confrontational manner.
Music has allowed youth to reinterpret cultural materials in new contexts and to combine them into styles that reflect their own values and to mark a distinct identity. The recording industry and mass media gate keepers may control which products are distributed, but they cannot control how such texts are used. Participants will often reappropriate mainstream culture for their own expressive purposes. This subcultural appropriation of commodified culture back in to forms that can then put to bona fide expressive and/or subversive use is the very opposite of commodification (even though such uses can be commodified themselves). Often more traditional codes and modes of music are employed in novel combination with new technologies to create original musical forms. Subcultural theorists (especially of the ‘Birmingham School’, e.g. Hebdige) have demonstrated how audiences have continually and actively transformed mass produced products by employing them for novel expressive purposes, for example record turntables in early 1980’s rap music. (Often accompanying fashions will reflect the subversive use of items, such as punks using safety pins as facial decorations). David Riesman believes that such activity has a ‘double articulation’ social function, enabling youth to both participate in parental modes, and to develop new modes of response that allow them to confront and solve inherent problems and contradictions in the parent culture, resulting in an emancipated and distinctive generational identity that prepares them for the challenges of their age. The empowerment, direction and vision supplied by such a force is of increasingly vital function in late capital secular society where religion, family and school all have less guiding influence on young people’s lives. The original Rock ‘n Roll movement (1955-57) helped perform this function and was seized upon by the youth with a fervour perhaps unsurpassed since. They embraced it as an authentic expression of their desires, resonating ‘youth’s common feelings and experiences in a shared public language.’ It served to map ‘the specific structures of youth’s affective alienation on the geographies of everyday life.’ In John Lennon’s words, ‘Rock ‘n Roll was real, everything else was unreal.’
Yet although subcultures may be able to appropriate industry created music for their purposes, continued recycling of raw material for either industry or subcultural appropriation must eventually exhaust the material’s intrinsic use value for either side.
Only music springing from organic expression is capable of producing the new forms of music that can adequately perform such cultural functions, and its creation depends upon the presence of the organic conditions it requires to develop.
‘Cultural cooling’ can be said to be the spiritual twin of the physical damage caused to the world by the onslaught of industrial production. As Keith Negus comments, commercial music itself ‘loses its link to non-commercial forms of expression and its forms lose their radical potential when co-opted, de-contextualizing and therefore de-politicizing them. Roy Shuker believes that although popular music once articulated genuine rebellion, it has now become ‘thoroughly commercial and appropriated into postmodern capitalist order.’
Ian MacDonald illustrates this in discussing how the phrase ‘Higher and Higher’ has been appropriated in to oblivion. When Sly and the Family Stone used it at Woodstock with a largely white audience, it signified a ‘transcendental dissolution of social, racial and sexual barriers’. Now, as a threadbare cliché, it represents only dead culture, and is gutted of significance, reduced to ‘a crudely erotic sound accessory.’
Culture should provide a reflection by which we measure progress and direction not a photo opportunity for business interest that are in may respects its natural enemies. Yet in hyper-commercial late capital society the speed of cultural turnover allows even reflections themselves to become absorbed and appropriated, and resistant ‘traction’ becomes difficult to find. As Fredric Jameson observes, co-optation leaves the arts with nothing to ‘push against’. ‘Even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash, are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed …… as they can achieve no distance’. Culture has in this way become both visionless and cannibalistic, and analogous to artificial intelligence. On the surface it may appear perform its task adequately, but there is no subjective, living, conscious realm. Living culture has purpose. Processed culture becomes a zombie - mindless.

The onslaught of hyper–commercialism is continuously progressing into popular music and deciding the ‘nature’ of its content. Consumerism and hyper-commercialism converse in a feedback loop that effects consumers, artists, the industry and music itself dialectically. Major labels are now increasingly looking to brands to help them fund new acts, their answer to the failure of their model to re-intensify their efforts in the same direction rather than to question the direction itself. EMI have stated that branding will be key to their future musical projects and have appointed Elio Leoni-Sceti as CEO of EMI music as he came from a brands background.According to Music Ally, Sony are now ‘deciding at the A&R stage what type of career (and, hence, how much marketing spend is available) it can deliver to a new artist depending on how willing they are to work with brands’. Branding potential is seen as the most important aspect of a new signing and 360o deals make its benefits crucial to industry earnings. For example, in 2008 Beyonce earned £53 million, yet only £13 million came from record sales - the rest coming from alternative sources such as touring and merchandise (£8 million), endorsements (£12 million), and £9 million from her clothing range. Clothing lines, for some time common amongst hip-hop stars, have become almost de rigueur amongst big names in general, e.g. Sean John (P Diddy), LAMB (Gwen Stefani), H&M (Madonna, Kylie Minogue), New Look (Lily Allen) and Evans (Beth Ditto). Take That endorse Marks and Spencer clothing, and even ‘rock bad boy’ Liam Gallagher has started his own range – ‘Pretty Green’. Many pop acts are multiple endorsers - Girls Aloud, The Saturdays, The Black Eyed Peas and 50c seemingly (according to Music Ally) ‘putting their names to any product, often simultaneously’. The priority ability for these acts is their cash-generation ability. They function as shelves rather than as creators. Major labels are becoming primarily ‘brand managers’, where the musical element is reduced to the role of an ambient background or theme accompanying the particular product’s continuous cross-promoting advertisement.
More and more, mainstream music and artists are thus being mutated by being subjected to the logic of advertising, even at grassroots level. Top Man and NME work together on the TopMan ‘CTRL’ campaign using new acts to target the NME readership demographic, in an attempt to wed fashion to new acts and grassroots live music. Music increasingly reflects marketing processes, as decades of dialectical interaction between music and media formats have had a direct impact upon form and reception. To quote Marshall McLuhan, ‘the medium is the message’. The manner in which culture is delivered will mutate its form and meaning into that of a compatible nature. The industrialization of music and its delivery through the mass consumerism platforms of multi media now characterize music itself. Culture and commerce have never been such happy bedfellows.
Marketing also serves (even if unconsciously) to create a field of reference which draws in the listener as an active participant. A secondary (incorporeal) existence is created and hyper-commercialized via combinations of radio, TV, film and music press. Here, the language of advertising attempts to project associative images on to the consciousness of its buyers, which is integrated with the music to build up a context around the release that the demographic will hopefully literally buy into. The ‘holy grail’ is to create meaning in the buyers mind so that they have the feeling that they are participating in something important. This will then (again through the associative function of advertising language) transfer into the brand. From there the band name or a symbol becomes linked to and thus articulates the values of importance (or the empowerment fantasies) of the targeted demographic - ‘Girl power’ for the Spice Girls adolescent female followers, for example – or physically/sexually powerful alter egos of gangster rappers for boys. Capitalism, consumerism and the music /advertising hybrid they have created all harmonize in perfect pitch where marketing mechanisms reconstruct social reality in consumers’ minds in a way that appears to correspond to their interests. Here the buyer becomes subjectively invested and feels that the industry is realizing his interests rather than vice-versa. The more unconscious such processes are, the more effective they are.
Popular music is now inbred with the capitalist value it came to serve. Artists frequently pursue links with advertising for publicity, a practice considered shameful by the previous generation. Music journalist Don Watson believes that ‘never has the world of pop culture been so close to the world of advertising – the world of lifestyle sales.’ Music culture academic Sarah Cohen studied young British bands and found that there was a significant number of them who had very little musical ambition per se, and who were focussed on attaining the ‘pop star lifestyle’ they have viewed in the media and were welcoming of any industry ‘manipulation’ that might help them achieve it. When ‘artists’ themselves can be so willing to ally business interests with their own, consumers are far more likely to accept increasingly commercial culture. In this way, the goals of the industry become those of the consumers and artists – and the vicious circle is complete as together they form a dialectical symbiosis.

Major label driven media have directly contributed to culture’s functional decline. Mass-media by nature deals in representations rather than realities. The onus is then on creating the constituents of the representations rather than the constituents of the underlying substance, thus the creative order of media-ready creations becomes inverted. Rather than representation being a gloss or wrapping paper on a package, the content has become the optional extra. Musical ability becomes an afterthought to the modern popstar’s potential (marketability) as an accepted visual presentation of celebrity. Rather than marketing those with musical potential, music is produced for those with marketing potential. Newspapers and magazines are now littered with pages covering the lifestyles of self-styled famous-for-being-famous celebrities. This reflects the cultural triumph of both representation over reality, and style over substance.

Jean Baudrillard observed that in commercial culture ‘the commodity is produced as a sign and signs (culture) are produced as commodities.’ Mass production and consumerism allow culture to be circulated and consumed as commodities in a system of ‘sign exchange value’(substitutable and part of an interchangeable fashion system). Culture is a hollow illusory vision of what it once was. It has been codified and rationalized to fit capitalist production and reproduction. All is now hyperreal. Just as pornography is ‘more sexual than sexual’ yet utterly devoid of any real sexual communion or nature, so is culture. The sign eventually kills off all referent meaning by absorbing even representation itself as a simulacrum.
This is how the rise of MTV, the industry focus upon video-friendly acts and the continuation of video culture via on-demand internet formats (such as you tube) have been instrumental in the creation of today’s musical culture. Once video became a highly influential format, the format began to dictate the content. Video-compatible artists became much stronger brands, formulating new rules and new aesthetic strategies which linked musical performance to new technical and economic requirements. It is here that signs and images were able to do to musical culture what they had to other forms of visual culture.
Just as the conversion of analogue to digital recording technology codified music into a form compatible with the computer systems that had begun to run industrial businesses, video helped to make music freely interchangeable with other forms of commercial culture where sign value is of prime concern (this code however, would eventually allow music enough freedom to escape through file-sharing). Video music is overlayed with advertising’s language of images which follows its own aesthetic, necessarily permeating the music and depriving music of its traditional meaning, swallowing up and blending referent images styles and symbols. It creates (to coin Peter Wicke’s phrase), ‘an aesthetic of the synthetic’. The combination of picture and sound allows for the potential of a powerful art form, yet videos tend to stick within the paradigm of advertising language. Today MTV Europe concentrates upon mainstream top 40 Hip Hop and ‘R&B’ videos (a term now referring to hip-hop beat-driven ballads). Greil Marcus accurately describes the majority of such videos as being typically characterized by a narrativeless ‘pornography of money, fame and domination, all for no reason outside itself.’ This is not to say that video music’s reception is standardized, but to emphasize how the translation of previously ‘logical’ referents such as text, music and pictures into the ‘aesthetic of the synthetic’ via the integration of visual, verbal and musical stereotypes leads to the dissolution of meaning rather than a progressive pluralism.
Essentially, video gave priority to visual appeal over musical. The cultural function of an artist’s music (substance) became secondary to the economic function of the appeal of the artist’s representation in mass media (style). Musical form itself is thus altered via the marketing mindset of video – another example of how the form of the media through which music has been marketed has directly affected musical culture.

3(b) The effects of the visual media upon musical culture

Video has increased the popularity and acceptability of standardized artless popular music culture where a trash aesthetic kitsch-value supersedes any concern for artistry. The most popular music programmes on both British and American television – The X Factor and American Idol- frequently debase the concept of artistry by referring to its impressionist performers as ‘artists’. The results of the pervasive ‘aesthetic of the synthetic’ could not find more powerful expression than in The X Factor, where contestants are systematically and ritually ridiculed or eulogized by judges who have no artistic pedigree of their own beyond involvement in manufactured -for -television pop acts. It only makes sense in the logic of advertising where, as Baudrillard has explained, detached referents (‘signs’) refer to each other only. One judge, Cheryl Cole, is a splendid example of this. Her job is nominally as an authoritative talent judge, yet she is actually present due to her celebrity and concomitant viewer figure- pulling power. Her celebrity is nominally due to her talent, yet it is in actuality due to her place in a TV-created pop group, which she was awarded only due to her potential as a celebrity (by another set of TV talent judges of no musical pedigree), and now she passes the baton. At no time is this chain of events interfered with by what the programme is nominally concerned with-the potential of talent. Rather, it is quite apparently and blatantly driven by earning potential and marketing logic. Yet this is accepted by millions. This can only be possible where corporate logic has festered within culture to the point that that it has superseded (or at least can continually suspend) millions of people’s sense of reality beyond its dictum. If they do realize the difference, then the pervasiveness of corporate logic has denied them any concern as to the benefits of the marginalization and reduction of the arts to entertainment forms. Nor could they be seriously concerned that the primacy of the quantitative and objective development of businesses over the qualitative and subjective development of individuals may not constitute progress.
Some believe that such programmes such as The X-Factor are ‘harmless’/ ‘just a bit of fun’ etc. But The X Factor has 12 million viewers. It is effectively Britain’s largest regularly shared ‘cultural’ experience, yet it is both cynically formulated and utterly banal. It actively encourages the rehashing of other performers’ material and even standardized performance poses, (not to mention choreographed ‘emotional moments’) and allows no musical creativity whatsoever. Culturally it performs no function other than to reflect its own simulacra world of pop stars with no musical talent, artists with no material, and judges with no authority.


3(c) Anti-cultural legislation


The assembled musical culture led by major label practice major is so pervasive that the value of articulate musical culture and the comprehension of the conditions necessary to its continuity would appear to be specialist knowledge. Sadly, the British Government have a worryingly confused grasp of these issues. In 2008 Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister and David Cameron, the shadow Prime Minister both decided to seek an audience with Simon Cowell (co-creator of The X Factor and American Idol) in order to ‘get in touch’ with today’s youth culture. According to journalist Alice Thomson, the Prime Minister blocks all calls when The X Factor is on and during the last series ‘became so immersed that he wrote to a dozen contestants urging them on’. Steve Hilton, Director of Strategy for the Conservative Party has called the series a work of a ‘genius’- an opinion only possible if the admiration of the creation of wealth takes precedence over all other characteristics or concern for the creative culture. This is the hallmark of the marketing mentality, where all qualities are surrogate to financial success. The X Factor is, in fact, a work of genius - as a piece of cynical capitalist opportunism. Millions pay to inform the programme’s parent company which act they would like to spend the most money on. However, as a contribution to culture it is remedial. Thomson believes that the political interest is in fact due its audience being able to provide a superior barometer of taste – ‘political insiders are analysing the fans. Who do they instinctively like?’It is a depressing and a damning indictment that politicians could be choosing candidates or handing out political roles based upon such findings. Even where the ramifications could not be more serious, the marketing rules of late capital can decide what is given an opportunity. At least in this sense the X Factor will be culturally representative, as culture’s function of representation is increasingly lacking in modern society.
It is this gap that is the crucial factor in the immense popularity of heritage acts and file sharing. There is evidently a need that processed culture is incapable of providing for.
The Government perversely looks to manufactured culture for cultural policy advice and to learn which candidates are most marketable, but seems disinterested in protecting Britain’s truly cultural heritage from demise. Politicians praise and participate in The X Factor, yet participate in the destruction of the creative infrastructure that has not only produced arguably the greatest cultural achievements in modern British history, but has had a fundamental role in creating the financial foundations upon which the modern industry and its financial might (and tax contributions) depend. Communal musical cultural space is increasingly difficult to come by in Britain. The same conservatism inherent in the big 4 record companies that prevents the risks being taken that could kick start a new musical movement is reflected in Government legislation.
In 2003 the Government introduced a music licensing system that required any venue or stand-alone events to apply for permission. The Guardian claimed that the application process is so laborious that the number of venues may be ‘more than halved’, as ‘pub, bar and restaurant owners were likely simply to give up’.
More recently, in late 2008, London has seen the introduction of the Metropolitan Police Form 696, to which all 21 London boroughs have signed up. This is a compulsory risk-assessment form that requires the declaration of the names, addresses, aliases and telephone numbers of all musicians and other performers, and (initially) the ethnicity of the expected audience, 14 days in advance. Failure to do so allows the police to shut down the event, and venue owners can lose their licences, suffer fines and even be imprisoned. In November 2008 an afternoon charity concert of school bands in a public park organized by a local councillor was shut down by police, as not all the personal details of the performers were available to the councillor. Such a draconian approach impacts dramatically upon the grass roots of musical culture. For example, this particular event would appear to be very similar to one that took place in Woolton, Liverpool in the summer of 1957, where Lennon and McCartney met. In a statement, the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors has drawn attention to the ‘serious implications for the future of the live music industry’. If, for example a band member was to be replaced due to illness, an event could be shut down. Communal creative spaces, with open mike nights and ‘jamming’ would become impossible and performers would be denied the perennial breakthrough opportunity of filling in for a cancelled act.