Who Owns Culture?: Digital Music and its Discontents

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Who Owns Culture?:

Digital Music and its Discontents

By Georgina Ustik (Student #: 11316292)

Under the supervision of Niels van Doorn

Master’s in Media Studies: New Media and Digital Culture University of Amsterdam, Graduate School of Humanities

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Abstract

This thesis seeks to explore how the internet and emerging technologies affect legal and cultural ownership of music. First, the concepts of legal and cultural ownership, value, and labor will be explored from a Marxist perspective. Next, culture will be defined as a complex way in which individuals connect their identity to community. Culture’s ownership will then be explored from two perspectives — legal ownership as applied via intellectual property, and cultural ownership, as demonstrated with cultural appropriation. These arguments will be set in the context of discriminatory systems and racial inequality, identifying ownership as a problem of access. These arguments will ultimately be applied to music, and how its value and ownership has transformed with the affordances offered by the internet, transformations under informational capitalism, and subsequent acceleration of globalization. This theoretical framework will then be applied to three case studies, each from a different aspect of digital music — the Syrian artist Omar Souleyman, the music blog and label Awesome Tapes from Africa, and the distribution of the Wu-Tang Clan album _{Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. These case} studies reveal how music ownership, from both a cultural and legal perspective, as set forth in the theoretical framework, are carried out on an individual level. Ultimately, this thesis argues the Internet opened up new modes of music distribution and interaction that do not fit into traditional ideas of ownership.

Keywords: Marx, Ownership, Private Property, Informational Capitalism, Culture, Digital Music, Exploitation, Platform Capitalism, Streaming, Globalization

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Chapter 1: Introduction

Culture and its products have long existed at the point of tension between the public and the private. While linked to identity and co-created through constant interaction, culture produces unique aesthetics and goods that attract people’s desires to

participate. However, as existing within capitalist structures, finding ways to control these cultural products has long been a source of tension, further exacerbated by the unequal social dynamics that encourage ownership by the few, and not the collective.

Within the last couple of decades, the world has undergone a transformation that has disrupted almost every aspect of daily life. Everything from the way in which people communicate to how business is carried out has taken on a new structure. Capitalism itself transformed, allowing for a new digital economy where data has become a highly valuable resource, and labor has become increasingly precarious. (Fuchs, Castells, Terranova, Gill & Pratt) The world moved online, putting people in closer contact than ever before, accelerating the effects of globalization. Networks between individuals allow for rapid cross-cultural influences, and the emergence of Web 2.0 has allowed for user participation on a whole new scale. (O’Reilly, Carr) Traditionally held notions of value and ownership have been upended, and virtually no industry has gone untouched.

Music sits at the forefront of this digital transformation. The music industry has long existed as a model of cultural control, an organized system of contracted labor that keeps artists in exploitative positions. (Greene) Since its origins the industry’s structure has undergone waves of centralization and decentralization. The internet disrupted the music industry possibly more than any other cultural industry. By changing the very format of music, allowing it to move faster and more freely than ever before and leaving it vulnerable to legal and cultural stealth, the internet undermined the value of music, and ownership by extension. (Kasaras, Sterne) As humans grapple with the emergence of new technologies, capitalist restructuring, and struggles over control of identity, the question of who owns music is more complicated than ever.

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Yet this question is also as important as ever. As society is undergoing a restructuring to keep up with the affordances offered by the internet, ownership over cultural products determines who can derive value from them, as well as who has a voice, and who does not. The internet is ripe with potential for allowing traditional power structures to be disrupted — its affordances allow previously marginalized voices a platform on a scale never seen before. But hegemonic forces are already taking control of digital informational flows in the form of powerful platforms which mediate the ways in which we go about our daily lives, and consume culture.

In this context, this thesis will attempt to explore the ways in which music’s ownership is being challenged by the affordances offered by the internet, revolving largely around a theoretical framework as set forth in chapters 2-5. Chapter 2 will begin by looking at what the concept of ownership means through a Marxist lens, presenting the idea that private property is inherently exploitative, and ownership is stealth from the public. This chapter will also explore the meaning of value, commodities, and the

exploitative labor-capitalist relations that are bound within both. This chapter will end with a brief critique of Marx through the lens of race theory, and a short exploration into how racism exacerbates already exploitative worker-capitalist relations. (Cox, Reich)

Chapter 3 will attempt to address the question: Who owns culture? First, it will look at culture as a complex object, laden with significance and identity politics. (Hall, Williams) Then the cultural industries will be introduced as the systematized way in which people have derived value from cultural products via legal ownership, or intellectual property. (Towse, Adorno & Horkheimer) Then, the ways in which private property and culture come directly into conflict will be explored, as well as how

intellectual property has been used as a tool of discrimination. (Greene, McDonald) The ways in which products are culturally owned will be addressing via the topic of cultural appropriation. (Ziff and Rao, Ahmed) Chapter 3 ultimately argues that ownership, from both a legal and cultural sense, is dependent upon access, which determines who can profit off of culture.

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Chapter 4 is an exploration of the ways in which the internet has transformed how capitalism functions. This chapter introduces the affordances set forth by Web 2.0, as well as how this has led to the emergence of information capitalism, which comes with new potential for exploitative labor practice. This chapter also engages with the rise of platforms, the ways in which the internet transformed labor, and the importance of data to the new economy. (Srnicek)

Chapter 5 attempts to address these topics in the context of digital music. First, by introducing music as a cultural object, and then by comparing the music industry pre- and post-internet. This chapter argues that pre-internet, the music industry was a strictly organized network of labors, controlled by labels via contracts. Shifts in centralization and decentralization led to swings in access for marginalized groups, but sets

artist-label relations ultimately in the context of Marxist ideas of exploitative labor practice. The post-internet subsection explores how the internet lowers barriers for music production, distribution, and promotion. The introduction of the mp3 allowed for music to move quickly to every corner of the globe, leaving it vulnerable to copyright infringement. (Sterne, Kasaras) Piracy and a shift in attitude towards music

consumption threw the music industry into crisis, forcing it to restructure and find value via music streaming platforms, which replaced the music label as the new hegemonic industry forces. As artists are left in a more precarious position than ever, the ways in which they derive value from networks is explored. (Baym) This chapter will end with a discussion of how the internet transformed cultural ownership over music, and allowed it to be easily detached from its context, leaving it more vulnerable than ever to cultural appropriation. This will conclude the literature review.

Chapter 6 is the methodology section, which will briefly introduce the three case studies and illuminate why the case study was chosen as the method to illustrate the theories set forth. The case studies will be briefly introduced. Chapter 7 will explore the three case studies — Syrian artist Omar Souleyman, music blog and label Awesome Tapes from Africa, and distribution method of the album _{Once Upon a Time in Shaolin} — via primary and secondary texts such as interviews, profiles, and news reports. This

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will follow with a discussion in Chapter 8, where the case studies will be compared and set in the context of the theoretical framework set forth in chapters 2-5. This will end with a brief conclusion in Chapter 9.

While much research on digital music’s ownership already exists, by conducting theory-based research on ownership’s meaning over cultural products, this thesis seeks to address how the emergence of the internet complicated ideas of digital music

ownership, from both a legal and cultural perspective. By taking a broad approach from a Marxist perspective in order to show larger exploitative practices, and reveal where existing theories of ownership fit awkwardly with music as a digital object, it will approach the question: Who owns music in the digital age?

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Chapter 2: What is ownership?

Property has been more than simply an imaginative or symbolic concept; it has been the medium through which struggles between individual and collective goals have been refracted.

– K.J. Greene (344)

2.1 Marx and Ownership

What does it mean to own? Ownership is the act of taking something – a product, property, or idea – and exerting claims over it. In capitalist society, this is done through legal means, wherein an individual or group is granted the rights over something, and commandeers the economic properties of it.

It is exerting control over goods that led anarchists and Marxists to think of private property as an act of injustice. The French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon decried “Property is theft!” (_{La propriété, c'est le vol !). In his 1840 book, What Is}

Property?: or, An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, _Proudhon

declared:

If I were asked to answer the following question: _{What is slavery? and I} should answer in one word, _{It is murder!, my meaning would be understood} at once... Why, then, to this other question: _{What is property? may I not} likewise answer, _{It is robbery!, without the certainty of being}

misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first? (55-56)

To anarchists such as Proudhon, property was t_{he way the market controlled people}. Proudhon was an influence to Karl Marx, who claimed that property was the

“appropriation of human life”:

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital_{or when we} directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. (Marx and Bottomore 159)

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Our individual desire to own is what drives us to privatize, taking objects away from the public’s use. Ownership is the act of cornering an object and its uses off from everyone else as much as it is about adding to our own individual wealth.

To Marx, it is this commandeering of public resources and goods that is the basis of exploitation: “Modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete

expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.” (Marx, Karl, et al. 484)

Private property is an act of appropriation, and appropriation operates upon a system of control and exploitation.

2.2 Value in ownership

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of value includes the following: (1) The monetary worth of something (market price)

(2) A fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged

(3) Relative worth, utility, or important

(4) Something (such as a principle or quality) intrinsically valuable or desirable… (Merriam-Webster)

Value, therefore, refers to both a constructed, economic value, such as a market price, as well as an intrinsic one, one that serves a higher calling, such as a principle. _The conflict between these two definitions is what drives the fundamental problem of commodified culture.

Ownership allows us to access and profit from this constructed value._{When one} owns the economic properties of a good, property, or idea, they can then profit off of the value of it, making it commoditized. Marx wrote of commodities as capitalism’s

fundamental units, and the capitalist economy itself is based upon the accumulation of these commodities. (Marx, “Outlines of the Critique” 80)

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To Marx, there are two kinds of value: “use-value” and “exchange-value”. As explained by Steve Keen in _{“Use-Value, Exchange Value, and the Demise of Marx's} Labor Theory of Value”_{, Use-value is intrinsic usefulness, or how an object satisfies} needs and wants. (3) Exchange-value, which is not intrinsic, is the price determined by the relativity of the market. (3)_{In his labor theory of value, Marx argues exchange-value} is derived from labor time. (3) Value, therefore, has a social dimension that allows the market to function and allow commodities to operate within it. _{This idea is mirrored in} the work of French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre: “Trade is… both a social and an intellectual phenomenon… Commodities arrive at the market-place already laden with significance.” (qtd. In Hebdige 17) Economic exchange comes at the cost of exploitative social relations. _{The power dynamics and inequalities that existed in the conditions in} which the good was created influence the good’s value upon its arrival to the

marketplace.

Marxist ideas of value and the intrinsic exploitative nature of the market are important when grappling with the complexities of cultural ownership. Culture is shared and community-based, which makes it vulnerable to influence and stealth. Because of this, when placed in the context of the market, huge new opportunities for exploitation and inequality are opened up. The losers in capitalist systems are very often the workers who themselves created the cultural goods.

2.3 The Worker

An essential aspect of ownership and the nature of capitalist exploitation is the role of the worker and their relation to the capitalist. While the worker or laborer spends labor time to produce, they often don’t see the profits of their labor.

The Marxist idea of “surplus value”, as explained by George Brenkert in

“Freedom and Private Property in Marx”, illustrates_{this relationship between the worker} and capitalist: “Modern (capitalist) private property is the power possessed by private individuals in the means of production which allows them to dispose as they will of the

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worker's labor-power.” (123) While the worker is employed and compensated, what they produce is more valuable than the sum of their labor. This idea of “surplus value” or “unpaid labor”, where the worker is purposefully paid less than he produces, is the main goal of production in capitalism. The capitalist’s ability to “dispose as they will of the worker's’ labor-power” keeps the worker vulnerable in the hands of the capitalist. (123) Furthermore, surplus-value production _{“costs the worker labour but the capitalist} nothing, and… becomes the legitimate property of the capitalist”. (Marx “Capital” 731)

Therefore, capitalism and private property operate at the expense of the worker.

In wage-labor systems, workers are paid to produce a product, but once it is made, it is transferred elsewhere, severing ties between the product and the producer: “labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute _{private property as its developed state} of contradiction._{” (Marx “Economic and Philosophic” XXXiX) Workers’ “labor-power”, or} their ability to produce, is sold to the capitalist for a wage, yet there is no equal

exchange for the profit that the capitalist reaps. The worker then feels a sense of alienation from the product they produce, the fruit of their labor, as well as their work itself, upon its appropriation at the hands of the capitalist as it is no longer theirs. (Marx “Economic and Philosophic” 5)

The role of the worker in capitalism is important to address regarding ownership in that it is the fundamental relationship between the capitalist and worker that private property relies upon_{. Because of systematized exploitation, workers are left in a state of} alienation. When it comes to the cultural industries and their products, capitalism keeps in place systems where certain groups are continuously making money off of the culture of others. This, of course, continues within the new dynamics set forth by the internet and a new digital economy, but creates a very different kind of value and exploitation, as labor itself transforms. What Marx failed to include however was that this alienation and exploitation is not the same for everyone working as laborers. Social inequalities that exist in the world and industries pervade capitalism and further antagonize its exploitations.

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2.4 Race and Marx: A Critique

“You can’t have capitalism without racism.”

- Malcolm X (Breitman et al. 122-124)

One aspect of capitalism that is noticeably lacking attention in Marxist theory, and for which his work has been critiqued, is that of the relationship between race and

capitalism. As Marxists extol again and again, capitalism is exploitation. It is based off the antagonistic relationship between the capitalist and the worker. It should come as no surprise, then, that the rise of capitalism correlated with that of possibly the most

exploitative worker-capitalist relationship to ever exist – colonialist slavery.

15th century Europe saw an expanding market due to the rise in maritime trade. (Mahapatra) To deal with the subsequent short labor supply and increased demand for trade goods – as well as a general increased interest in exploration – European

countries took to the seas for new trading partners, and their encounters with new lands led to colonization, leaving them huge tracts of land, and not enough labor to turn it profitable. (Mahapatra) Enter: slavery. It was at this point in time that slavery became the engine of industrialization to the US and UK, especially. (Blackburn)

Colonialism and slavery were capitalist inventions, inflicted upon populations for economic gain through the filters of racial bias. Modern capitalism is seen by many as further propagating social inequalities that began here, and that racism, and other forms of discrimination, are inherent to capitalism’s functions. In the essay “Labor in White Skin: Race and Working-class History”, David Roediger reflects on Marx and racism. According to Roediger, Marx did not take black populations as a serious industrial force in the labor market, and Marx himself claimed the ex-slave population

“will probably become small squatters, as in Jamaica”. (Roediger) He largely ignored race’s role in exploitative labor systems, allowing it to continue to grow and evolve outside Marxist discourse on exploitation.

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The sociologist Oliver Cox was an early adopter of the theory that racism is a function of capitalism: “_{it should not be forgotten that, above all else, the slave was a} worker whose labor was exploited in production for profit in a capitalist market. It is this fundamental fact which identifies the Negro problem in the United States with the problem of all workers regardless of color.” (Cox _{xxxii) He claimed that race relations} “are labor capital-profit relations; therefore, race relations are proletarian bourgeois relations and hence political-class relations”. (Cox 336) Racism is yet another tool that was used to feed the exploitative monster of capitalism.Both capitalism and racism are systems that organized people into the “haves” and “have-nots” – those that profited and those that faced continual exploitation.

Post slavery, laws and institutions were held in place in the United States that disallowed the black population from owning property, voting, or participating in society on a very basic level. This had many effects, one of the largest which was that the black population was never allowed to accumulate wealth. This has been the subject of

numerous economic studies. For example, Michael Reich’s 1974 paper, “The

Economics of Racism”, claimed that _{“racism is a key mechanism for the stabilization of} capitalism and the legitimization of inequality”. (107) By looking at census data

regarding the correlation of wage and ethnicity through a Marxist lens, he argues that most workers are affected by racism and that “racism is likely to take firm root in a society that breeds an individualistic and competitive ethos”. (112) Racism and capitalism go hand in hand.

When approaching the topic of culture, a concept that is grounded in identity, race is an unavoidable, and even central, topic. It is important to keep in mind that capitalism works most efficiently when already marginalized groups are being exploited. While this thesis does not attempt to take race on as its main argument, systems of inequality, such as racism, are important and unavoidable aspects to discussions of exploitation in the contemporary music industry, and, therefore, discussions of ownership.

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Chapter 3: Who owns culture?

3.1 Culture

In 1976, Welsh Marxist Raymond Williams published “Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society”. According to Williams, culture has three categories of application:

(i) the independent and abstract noun which describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development... (ii) the independent noun… which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general... (iii) the independent and abstract noun which

describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity. This seems often now the most widespread use: culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and film. (Williams 90)

Therefore, culture is a process of development, as well as a way of life. One’s own culture can be identified by asking what are the “general causes” and “trends” that manifest in “everyday life”. (qtd. In Hebdige 18) Daily life creates meaning, and distinct patterns of daily life form when members of a group of people are in constant contact with one another. This results in the creation of a common aesthetic identity, resulting in unique cultural products.

Culture is a crucial part of our very identities as individuals and members of groups. Sociology theorist Stuart Hall claimed that it is through culture that we connect our identity as people to a larger collective in that it “bridges the gap between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ – between the personal and the public worlds. (Culture) helps to align our subjective feelings with the objective places we occupy in the social and cultural world.” (Hall 276) Our relationship to culture is both spiritual and earthly, abstract and concrete. It is how we participate in a larger collective, making it social in nature. It is formed through interactions with the immediate surroundings and other people that one comes into contact with in daily life. In _{Nations and Nationalism,} philosopher Ernest Gellner said: “...culture is now the necessary shared medium... within which alone the members of the society can breathe and survive and produce.

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For a given society it must be one in which they can all breathe and speak and produce; so it must be the same culture”. (37-8) In this sense, culture is also public. It is a

co-creation, and shared between the self and other members of one's community. It is worth acknowledging that cultures, particularly when linked to nationalism, can have violent histories. Modern nations’ discriminatory or colonialist legacies can result in a cultural imperialism. With unequal power between nations, civilizations, and societies, cultures can become structures of inequality in and of themselves. Stuart Hall claimed that, despite often being seen as monoliths, cultures are “cross-cut by deep internal divisions and differences, and ‘unified’ only through the exercise of different forms of cultural power”. (617) Inequalities that exist within a society are built into the DNA of said society’s culture. As different people within a society have different experiences within it, it’s important to take cultural products within this context.

Due to its social nature, culture is vulnerable, but also attractive as it results in unique aesthetics from which products can be made. It’s “use-value” is high — it allows for diversity in consumerist products, and provides people with a sense of belonging to a larger group. However, these products also have an “exchange-value”, constructed by the market. There are entire industries based off of owning the products of identity and community.

3.2 The Cultural Industries

Ownership over culture matters because ownership, as previously discussed, is how value is derived from the products that emerge from that culture. Culture’s practice and display results in goods which are used as vessels to identity, which can communicate a huge amount of information about a people. When a culture can derive profits from their own cultural products, it’s all well and good, but often this is not the case.

In the book _{The Cultural Industries, Ruth Towse defines cultural industries as} those that “mass-produce goods and services with sufficient artistic content to be considered creative and culturally significant.” (170) They produce cultural content on an industrial scale and rely on the labor of cultural workers, such as artists. The concept

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of the “cultural industries” takes its roots from Adorno and Horkheimer, who, in their seminal work "Th_{e Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"}, described popular culture as one of mass production, and the complicity of the consuming public in participating. (1242) To Adorno and Horkheimer, “modern” technology brought on an industry where cultural products all look the same: “Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable.” (1244) Such standardized mass-production was a defining feature of Fordism, a system that existed in developed economies in the mid-20th century. (Thompson)

As the economy evolved in the later half of the 20th_{century due to increased} globalization, so to did cultural production. (Baca 169) This time, referred to as Post-Fordism, marked a shift in production from mass production to specialized,

small-batch production, characterized by “a well-developed ability both to shift promptly from one process and/or product configuration to another (dynamic flexibility) and to adjust quantities of output rapidly up or down over the short run without any strongly deleterious effects on levels of efficiency.” (Kiely 98) This new era of production emphasized cultural products as “_{luxury consumer goods”. (Jessop)}

This movement from Fordism to post-Fordism marked a fundamental shift in the way the public consumed cultural goods. This illustrates how attitudes towards cultural value and ownership have been externally linked to outside forces, such as economy or emerging technologies. The introduction of the internet would again completely change how culture was produced and consumed.

3.3 Intellectual property

The cultural industries, like other industries, function off of a system of privatization. This ownership is exerted using intellectual property, which is a set of legal protections

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It is through these legal protections that artists and creative and cultural workers seek remuneration for their products. The tool used to apply intellectual property rights is copyright.

Copyright essentially converts cultural products “such as art, dance, music and literature into commodities”. (Greene 354) As K.J. Greene lays out in his paper, “Copyright, Culture & Black Music: A Legacy of Unequal Protection”, the rights

intellectual property law protects in the United States were first laid out in the 1909 Act, and then expanded in the 1976 Act. The 1909 Act provides the following protections: “the right to print, reprint, publish, copy and sell copyrighted works; to translate, convert, arrange or adapt copyrighted works; and to distribute and publicly perform copyrighted works.” (346) The 1976 Act added the following: “the exclusive rights of reproduction, adaptation, publication, performance and display.” (348-349) The law also protects against financial “appropriation of an author’s creative works”. (349) This act of another using the work for commercial gains constitutes “infringement”. (349) Artists and authors can collect payment for their intellectual property via royalties, which essentially means they lease out their works, or can sue to recover damages from others using their

works. Copyright protects cultural products by allocating ownership to a single copyright holder, preventing others from deriving value from its economic properties.

In order to not violate the First Amendment’s promise of the right to free expression, copyright does not protect “ideas, principles, genres or facts from public use.” (Greene 349) This allows “the artist, the thinker and the social commentator the right to speak freely without intellectual restraint of any kind” (350), but also creates a grey area when it comes to what constitutes an “idea” vs. a “work”. This sums up the paradoxical aspect of copyright and creative or cultural works: How can one restrict the use of ideas without stifling freedom of expression and creativity? How can cultural identities be protected?

This “idea-expression dichotomy” is criticized for being “the most notorious problem in copyright law”. (Greene 351) As Judge Learned Hand oncesaid, “obviously no principle can be stated as to when an imitator has gone beyond copying the ‘idea’,

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and has borrowed its ‘expression’. Decisions must therefore inevitably be _{ad hoc.” (351)} Of course, opening up copyright to a case by case basis is putting immense power in the hands of the legal system, which comes along with its own set of biases. Therefore, copyright decisions are often not cut and dry, and decisions over copyright violations can be subjective, even discriminatory. This has been prevalent throughout the history of the music industry, where certain groups were denied copyright.

Despite the limitations that copyright poses, privatization is thought to incentivize creativity in fields such as the arts and technology, and is even written into the American Constitution. The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power “[t]o promote the

Progress of Science and useful Arts”. (Intellectual Property Clause)The Supreme Court, which enables Congress to enact patent and copyright law to encourage innovation, maintains “[t]he immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return of for an author’s creative labor… the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to

stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good”. (Greene 346) Many creative and cultural workers make a living via contract, a legal agreement transferring the rights to the economic properties a workers product.

3.4 Property vs. Culture

The true issue of owning culture is the inevitable conflict of private vs. public. While intellectual property in theory promises to work on behalf of the cultural worker, it is ultimately a tool of the market. The U.S. Constitution romantically claims that copyright is meant to promote creativity and innovation, but Greene argues instead that “the focus on the American copyright system has been on economic protection, rather than

protection of personal rights of artists.” (347) American copyright law is inextricably grounded in economic incentive theory:

(The) principal object of intellectual property law in the United States is to ensure consumers a wide variety of information products at the lowest possible price… through the grant of private property rights enabling individuals and businesses to appropriate to themselves the value of the information they produce, giving them incentive to produce still more. (348)

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This is a given, as private property itself is a capitalist function, but copyright comes directly into conflict with culture’s fundamentally public traits.

Stuart Hall defined cultural identity as “those aspects of our identities which arise from our ‘belonging’ to distinctive ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and, above all, national cultures”. (596) The objects that are produced from these cultures are therefore imbued with identity, and inherently bound up in ethnic, religious, or national dynamics. Products carry this with them as they enter the market.

Culture is co-produced by members of the public, but when the product of these social processes is privatized, it is cut off from the public that co-created it. This often doesn’t work. The ubiquitous song “Happy Birthday to You” provides an example of the problems that copyright poses in regards to cultural products. As Heather McIntosh looks at in her paper “Who Owns Culture?”, this song has become a tradition of celebrating birthdays in the U.S.. Based on Patty and Mildred Hill’s children’s song “Good Morning to All”, the highly recognizable tune has been translated in multiple languages. (529) In 1988, Warner Music Group copyrighted the song, and attempted to seek fees from groups such as the Girl Scouts who sang it at meeting. (529) Despite public backlash, Warner Music Group still earns more than $2 million annually from its use in TV and film. (529) “In essence, corporate copyright holders seek their revenues no matter what the content’s uses, its users’ identities, or those users’ motivations.” (529) “Happy Birthday to You” provides an example of how copyright is difficult to apply to, and ideologically comes into conflict with, culture. Warner Music Group may make money off of the song’s use in media, but this doesn’t stop it from being sung at nearly every birthday in the United States.

The problem of intellectual property also raises a fundamental question: who can claim copyright, and who cannot?

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3.5 Copyright is not neutral, and never has been

Intellectual property is a form of control. To repeat Greene, it is a tool of the market. It has been used for centuries to funnel money to certain groups of people, and away from others.

Greene’s paper explores how African American music artists were historically deprived of legal protection over their art, and how copyright actively works to

exacerbate this inequality. He says that copyright’s original purpose was to essentially “provide neutral economic incentives to creators and protects economic interests in original works” (341). But, he argues, copyright is not neutral, and never has been. From a Marxist perspective, intellectual property and copyright are exploitative concepts inherently. This exploitation is deepened by years of explicit and institutional

discrimination based on race, gender, or class.

As shown in the case of contracted labor, the group that produces cultural products is not necessarily the one who derives profit from them. Greene looks

specifically at the case of the music industry. While the music industry generally exploits all artists through contracts, Greene says it is “undeniable that African-American artists have borne an even greater level of exploitation and appropriation.” (341) This was, in part, because of “the interaction of the copyright regime and the contract regime”. (354) The 1909 Act did not enforce copyright protection at all “until the work was either

published with proper notice or registered. Thus, under the 1909 Act, the initial copyright registration for a work could list a claimant other than the author as the copyright

owner…” (353) Therefore, individuals who did not produce the cultural good could lay claim to its properties.

Due to African Americans being unable to accumulate wealth because of a recent history of slavery and discrimination, this resulted in many of their artworks being claimed by other parties who had the access to get there first. Additionally, the 1909 Act’s language and requirements were purposefully convolutedly phrased, so “artists

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unfamiliar with legal requirements could easily find their works injected into the public domain, which resulted in the loss of their economic rights to copyright protection.” (Greene 354) The 1976 Act eliminated this, but by that point there was already a large body of work that had not been protected, a result, Greene argues, of intellectual property fostering inequality in that it is “inaccessible to the unschooled” and “worthless where the creator failed to comply with legal requirements.” (355) Not only is intellectual property exploitative in that it is privatization, but it was also created in systems of discrimination. Copyright, as Greene claims, “is owner-centered, not creator-centered”, which leaves large parts of society vulnerable to theft. (356) Social groups with less bargaining power or who are the target of discrimination are automatically put at a severe disadvantage. (356) Copyright has helped to keep systems of discrimination in place by denying economic opportunity to certain groups.

Even without operating within discriminatory institutions and in the historical context of racial discrimination, the very way copyright functions prevents it from being neutral. McIntosh echoes these ideas put forth by Greene by claiming that copyright heavily favors Western cultural products, such as music. Copyright “emphasizes authorship, such as through lyrics and through composition, and it emphasizes artists over the personnel involved in production”. (530) It also favors cultural products on a physical record, such as sheet music or tape, etc, putting cultural groups whose art relies heavily on oral tradition at a further disadvantage. Therefore the individual artist is favored, “negating external cultural, personal, or even industrial influences.” (530) This puts many non-Western artists at a disadvantage, especially in areas of the world where group music performances or oral traditions are dominant.

When it comes to legal ownership, issues of access and opportunity are

important as they reveal the discriminatory ways in which capitalist forces work within the cultural industries._{Cultural ownership has its own set of codes of conduct and} violations located well outside of the range of law, which can perhaps best be demonstrated by examining the concept of cultural appropriation.

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3.6 Cultural Appropriation

“In our culture, people own stories. Individuals own stories. Tribes own stories. Nations own stories. And there is a protocol if you want to tell those stories: you go to the storyteller. And if you don’t and you start telling those stories, then you are stealing.”

- Maria Campbell, CBC Radio’s Morningside (Morningside)

Now overused as a buzzword, cultural appropriation’s meaning has largely been lost in contradictory think pieces and incendiary comment sections, and diluted into an

overused “politically correct” accusatory liberal term. It is the phrase that has launched a thousand digital witch hunts, yet to identify it is slippery. In its essence, cultural

appropriation refers to a dominant group of people taking elements from, and profiting off of, the culture of another. It is the idea of intellectual property for areas where intellectual property doesn’t cover.

Of course, cultures borrowing from and influencing one another has always existed. World history consists of groups of people moving around the globe, interacting with one another, battling each other, and combining. Often cultures are already formed from amalgamations of other cultures. In cultural products this can be seen in new styles, genres, and aesthetics being created.

But what is the difference between cultural exchange and cultural appropriation, and what is it about the latter that makes it distinctly negative? The answer is not so clear. In_{the book Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation, Bruce Ziff and} Pratima Rao define cultural appropriation as “the taking – from a culture that is not one’s own – of intellectual property, cultural expression or artifacts, history and ways of

knowledge”. (Ziff and Rao 1) But this definition does not differentiate appropriation satisfactorily from cultural exchange. As said before, cultures carry their own history of conflict, subjugation, and exploitation. What is most at stake in cultural appropriation, and why it is so contentious, is that it acknowledges culture exists within a landscape of power dynamics.

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Cultural appropriation acknowledges that society as it exists today largely regards whiteness as dominant. The long history of white culture subsuming the accomplishments and innovations of minority cultures is a concept that has been well-documented in academia. One such scholar is Sara Ahmed, who, in her paper “Phenomenology of Whiteness”, explores how whiteness is seen as a default, and racialization only happens when nonwhite bodies interrupt the norm: “...bodies are shaped by by histories of colonialism, which makes the world ‘white’, a world that is inherited, or which is already given before the point of an individual’s arrival. This is the familiar world, the world of whiteness, as a world we know implicitly.” (153) The effects of colonialism have left the world in a state where nonwhite is a novelty, turning it into an object of curiosity. These ideas have entered into contemporary dialogue of culture. In the 2017 New York Times article “The Identity Politics of Whiteness”, Laila Lalami explains: “‘Identity’... is almost never applied to whitenesss. Racial identity is taken to be exclusive to people of color… ‘White’ is seen as the default, the absence of race.”

(Lalami) This propagates a kind of orientalism when it comes to any culture that isn’t white: “...people will tell you they are fans of black or Latino music, but few will claim they love white music.” (Lalami) Thus, whiteness acts as a default against which all other cultural identities are juxtaposed. An article in _{The New Inquiry called “Can the} White Girl Twerk?” echoes this, defining the most troubling aspect of appropriation as “The presumed generic whiteness of the mainstream U.S. audience means that white consumers decide not only what blackness is, but also what they want out of it”.

(Siddiqi) Cultural appropriation reinforces one culture as the default, and everything else as the “other”, and a fun grab bag from which aesthetic and style can be taken from at whim. This creates a situation where whiteness is allowed a depth and complexity that other cultures aren’t.

This is a result of cultural colonization, which, in his seminal paper “Cultural Colonialism”, Frederico Ferro Gay describes as “a true death” and “the worst type of subjection”:

This bondage consists in the imitation of foreign languages, customs, and feelings, that is, in the absolute loss of the national idiosyncrasy. In effect,

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the national peculiarity of a people is its essence, its soul and its life. To the extent that it keeps it, whatever its civil distress may be, it can recuperate, but when it has lost even its own being and the consciousness itself, there is no longer any hope. (153)

Cultural colonialism results in a member of society being “indoctrinated to feel inferior by his racist conqueror.” (153) This can be seen when white culture subsumes the cultural products of another, turning them into properties of white culture after which they are elevated.

In the same way that access, or lack of access, to copyright keeps systems of oppression and discrimination in place, the fear with cultural appropriation is that in areas intellectual property law cannot touch – such as ideas – marginalized

communities will continue to be unable to profit from their own cultural products. When cultural products become instantly more valuable upon their subsumption into white mainstream culture, the culture that originally created it loses out, propagating a system where the most powerful groups continue to make money off of the most vulnerable. In this way, acts of cultural appropriation are akin to theft, in the same way that Proudhon decried.

It is useful to apply Marxist theories of labor, in particular worker alienation, to cultural appropriation. As previously discussed, a central aspect of class tension in capitalist systems is the alienation between the worker and its products. _(Marx “Economic and Philosophic” 5) _{When an industry takes on production of a cultural} product that is not their own, that cultural group is made to feel a sense of alienation to their culture’s products. The fruits of their labor – which could be thought of as years of interaction, building aesthetic and group value, rather than labor in a factory – are not in their own control.

Access to power matters in the same way that access to copyright opportunity matters – it determines who can profit off of a cultural object. “If we were all equal and that culture's members were not mocked, ostracized and objectified for wearing the same things, then it would be okay. But, unfortunately, that’s not the case.” (Berumen)

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When subordinated groups wish to exert ownership over the economic properties of their cultural goods, cultural appropriation poses a very serious roadblock.

3.7: Where does music fit into all of this?

Music is an interesting subject to apply ideas of ownership and value to because of its formal properties, and inextricable relationship to culture and identity. Music itself is not a physical object, and can be performed anywhere by anyone. When it is not

deliberately recorded, it is ephemeral. Music is often communally produced and shaped, and very often relies on being passed down through oral tradition, making it an integral part of a culture’s identity. R. Murray Schafer explored these ideas in his seminal work “The Soundscape”: “There can be little doubt then that music is an indicator of age, revealing, for those who know how to read its symptomatic messages, a means of fixing social and even political events.” (98) Music is an excellent indicator of cultural identity.

These are specific properties of music that make it especially difficult to own, and which the internet catalyzed by dissolving geographic boundaries, challenging

pre-existing methods for exerting legal ownership, and shifting the power structure of the industry and the relationship between artists and their music irreparably.

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Chapter 4: Enter: the internet

Since its invention in 1991 and the dot com bubble in the mid-90s, the World Wide Web has been doing exactly what it’s name promises: connecting people from all over the world in an intricate web, allowing them to share information, goods, and money at a rate faster than ever before. (Bryant) _{Huge tracts of fibre-optic cables were laid out,} literally connecting the globe, bringing_{new potential for cultures to interact, share}

knowledge, influence one another, and create new cultural and aesthetic practice. In his paper “Music in the Age of Free Distribution: MP3 and Society”, Kostas Kasaras

referred to it as “a modern sophisticated system that transcends national borders and accelerates cultural and economical globalization.” (Kasaras) The world suddenly

became a much smaller place. This, Kasaras claims, is what sets the internet apart from previous tech “revolutions”: “the Internet’s fundamental provision of interactivity” allows for a whole new realm of free expression. (Kasaras)

Following the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2001, the internet further

transformed from connecting computers to connecting internet users together through an “architecture of participation” encouraging rich user experiences via platforms and continually-updating services. (O’Reilly) This new “Web 2.0” allowed for users to generate content via platforms such as social media sites, media sharing sites, web applications, and more. Users had more ability than ever to collaborate online and interact in a dynamic digital space.

However, with this free movement of information came a brand new model of capitalism, wrought with potential for new ways of exploitation._{A new digital economy} emerged, which became “an increasingly pervasive infrastructure for the contemporary economy” and businesses flourished that “increasingly rely upon information

technology, data, and the internet for their business models.” (Srnicek 4) Data, or “the oil of the digital era”, took over as the dominant commodity. Traditional ideas of labor, worker-capitalist relations, and exploitation took on a new appearance. (The Economist “The World’s Most Valuable Resource”) Cultural industries, such as the music industry,

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came under the control of hegemonic tech companies that dealt in data rather than products. This “capitalist restructuring” is what many theorists refer to as informational capitalism. (Castells)

4.1 Informational Capitalism

First and foremost, it’s important to establish that the internet, like all technological innovation, does not operate outside of capitalist interests. As Christian Fuchs explored in the paper “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet”: “Technology is shaped by and shapes society in complex ways”, and these forces shaping society are “medium and outcome of capitalist interests, strategies, and restructuring.” (180) Despite cyber-utopian ideas of the internet bringing about emancipatory change to exploitative capitalist systems – this, in fact, was the ideal that the internet was built upon by nonprofit researchers in 1990 – all it truly did was shift the dynamics around. (Kot 25) Capitalism has always been about reducing production costs of goods as low as possible in relation to the market price of the good, and the internet emerged as a new way to do this.

In his book “Platform Capitalism”, Nick Srnicek looks at how the new digital economy emerged in the context of global economic activity: “Capitalism, when a crisis hits, tends to be restructured. New technologies, new organisational forms, new modes of exploitation, new types of jobs, and new markets all emerge to create a new way of accumulating capital.” (36) According to Srnicek, the new digital economy emerged with the dot com bubble forming and its subsequent burst in 2001 followed by the 2008 financial crisis, resulting in “the adoption of efficient technologies and techniques in the labour process, specialisation, and the sabotage of competitors.” (11) The structure of the global economy and the way it operated was forever changed.

And thus came a shift in how capitalism operated. Informational capitalism, as defined by Srnicek, is when “collective cooperation and knowledge become a source of value.” (38) In this new mode of capitalism, labor itself becomes “increasingly

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immaterial, oriented towards the use and manipulation of symbols and affects”, and “the product of work becomes immaterial: cultural content, knowledge, affects, and

services.” (38) The way we work has begun to revolve around the production of the theoretical and symbolic, rather than the physical. Knowledge has become a valuable resource that feeds the engine of the internet, cyclically making it more valuable.

So many users interacting and creating content online produced a huge amount of data. This data is constantly extracted by massive tech companies to attract

advertising revenue, giving them more revenue to purchase larger tracts of the internet. This required a new kind of business model, a mediary, that could handle such vast amounts of data: the platform, or the “digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact”. (Srnicek 42)_{These new platforms became the new hegemonic} forces in the digital economy, replacing traditional industry conglomerates as the

dominant forces. Platforms rely on the production of “network effects”, which means the more people who use it, the more valuable the platform becomes for the rest of the users. (45) Platforms competed against each other to attract new users, who supplied more data. From transportation to purchasing books to listening to music, steadily platforms became the new way in which consumers interacted with industries.

Platforms themselves became new mediatory spaces for exploitative labor practice. The new capitalist no longer exerts power over owning the means of

production, but “rather has ownership over information” (Srnicek 38). Under this new capitalism, class and exploitative labor practice transformed.

4.2 The new class system and knowledge worker

As Srnicek points out, capitalism requires “constant technological change”. (11)

Therefore labor itself constantly changes as a result. Despite the changes informational capitalism brought to the type of labor the new digital economy revolved around, it is still viable, and important, to look at digital labor through the lens of Marxist ideas of class exploitation.

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Who exactly is this new worker? _{Knowledge labor is defined as “labor that} produces and distributes information, communication, social relationships, affects, and information and communication technologies”. (Fuchs 186) Under informational

capitalism, knowledge workers produce knowledge goods, along with people using social media, media consumers, and other platforms and applications. The informational content they produce is then “appropriated by capital”. (187) Basically, people that _do stuff_{online are making money for the platforms and hegemonic forces that extract their} data.

This knowledge worker does not exactly fit into traditional Marxist notions of labor. Due to a movement towards outsourced labor under informational capitalism, “which means not having to take care of labor rights, ancillary wage costs, technology, etc.”, _{precarious employment — or labor that is insecure, unprotected, or unpaid —} grew. (Fuchs 186) _{According to Fuchs: “Formally they are self-employed and own and} control their _{means of production (brain, computer, etc.), but they are forced to}

permanently sell their own labor power per contracts to capitalist corporations that outsource of subcontract labor power.” (185) Traditional forms of labor saw the capitalist as the one owning the means of production, were often responsible for costs including both the that of the means of production as well as a certain amount of protection for the employee. But this new form of labor sees these workers without protection, while still contributing to the capitalist’s profit. This affects workers at all class levels. In their paper “In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work”, Rosalind Gill and _{Andy Pratt echo Fuchs:}

Transformations in advanced capitalism… have produced an apparently novel situation in which increasing numbers of workers in affluent societies are engaged in insecure, casualized or irregular labour. While capitalist labour has always been characterized by intermittency for lower-paid and lower skilled workers, the recent departure is the addition of well-paid and high-status workers into this group of 'precarious workers'. (2)

This growing class of precarious workers is representative of the more sinister aspects of the new kind of exploitation that informational capitalism brings.

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What’s more is that laborers now include all internet users. Web 2.0 created a dynamic web space for users to interact and create content on platforms, making those platforms more valuable for their owners. Fuchs argues that informational capitalism calls for an expansion in how we think of Marx ideas of class and labor to something that “include(s) everybody who creates and recreates spaces of common experience, such as user-generated content on the Internet, through their practices. These spaces and experiences are appropriated and thereby expropriated and exploited by capital to accumulate capital.” (179) _{Digital content is of value, and therefore anyone creating} content online is a worker, generating this value.

In an attempt to address this new_{class of digital laborers, Tiziana Terranova} argued in her paper “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy” that in late capitalist societies, internet users are laborers working for free and being exploited by capital. She compares digital labor to “the modern sweatshop”, and claims the digital cultural economy is largely made up of these free laborers. (33) The Internet “is

animated by… a continuous production of value”, and these laborers are producing this value for free not only “because capital wants them to; they are acting out a desire for affective and cultural production that is nonetheless real just because it is socially shaped.” (34) Generating content on the internet is now a part of socializing at large, which encourages users to spend more time on platforms creating.

Terranova references examples from other sources who have made claims the internet encourages exploitation of unpaid labor. _{In a 1999 article in WIRED concerning} the unpaid community leaders of AOL, Lisa Margonelli described their free work as a “cyber-sweatshop”. (Margonelli) Nicholas Carr has described Web 2.0 as a way of putting “the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work.” (Carr) To Carr, the new Internet is “an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few” – he even goes as far as to call it “digital sharecropping”. (Carr) An article from _{The New}

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Inquiry_{described digital labor as “transform(ing) our habitus… into an explicit productive} force without our conscious consent._{” (Horning)}

However, implications of slavery-like systems such as sweatshops lose sight of the idea that, while the work is unpaid, it is also pleasurable. Increased social capital, knowledge, and enjoyment are just a few things that internet users gain. The internet lowered the barrier of entry for creative work, allowing anyone with an internet

connection to create content. While this new concept of labor is exploitative in a Marxist sense, it is also a realm where workers themselves extract value, even if it is not in the form of a wage.

This capitalist restructuring has affected all industries, but as cultural content is one of the main outputs of immaterial goods under informational capitalism, this had an especially profound effect on the cultural industries.

4.3 Digital Culture

Similarly to how shifts in economy and increased globalization led to the development of Fordism and Post-Fordism led to a new mode of cultural consumption, so to did the world’s reaction to the exciting new possibilities of the internet create a new

infrastructure. In the his 2010 paper, Fuchs described the transformation of informational capitalism:

…the novel aspects are that organizations and social networks are

increasingly globally distributed, that actors and substructures are located globally and change dynamically (new nodes can be continuously added and removed), and that the flows of capital, power, money, commodities, people, and information are processed globally at high speed. (180)

This dynamic new system accounts for the internet’s global reach, lightning speed, and constantly reorganizing nature. The role of globalization in regards to an emergence of the new digital cultural industries cannot be stressed enough.

The world opened up, and took on a new form. Geographic distances and borders suddenly disappeared. The globe became “a space of flows, an electronic space, a decentered space, a space in which frontiers and boundaries have become

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permeable”. (Morley and Robins 115) This resulted in “a new electronic cultural space, a ‘placeless’ geography of image and simulation… this new global arena of culture is a world of instantaneous and depthless communication, a world in which space and time horizons have become compressed and collapsed…” (115) Culture and cultural identity itself felt the effects of rapid globalization. Globalization, defined by the Global Policy Forum as the process which “expands and accelerates the exchange of ideas and commodities over vast distances” has always existed, but the internet made it all the more prevalent. (Global Policy Forum) Suddenly, through a “compression of time and space horizons and the creation of a world of instantaneity and depthlessness”, (Morley and Robins 115) cultures were coming into contact at lightning speed, interacting with and influencing each other on a larger scale than ever before.

Culture adapted to the web. As Justin O’Connor said in “Intermediaries and Imaginaries in the Cultural and Creative Industries”, under the post-Fordist economy, “culture was being primarily used in an anthropological sense of a generalized system of meanings and practices (or way of life)”, but, after the emergence of the internet, culture became “heavily mediated by informational flows.” (383) Culture became

condensed, and packaged for quick online transfer. In order to keep up with the demand for the sheer volume of cultural content being shared under informational capitalism, “creativity, it was argued, would be the new transformative force for economies, and liberating for individuals at the same time.”₍₃₈₄₎

Under informational capitalism, the position of cultural workers changed perhaps more than any other, and came to “symbolize contemporary transformations of work.” (_{Gill and Pratt 26) Being creative and creating cultural content was viewed as bettering} oneself, encouraging cultural workers to enter into a growing number of precarious labor positions: “...the aspirations to autonomy of ‘cultural workers’, result(s) in a ‘precarity’ that was largely self-chosen.” (O’Connor 383) Internet users grew rapidly, dynamically interacting online, allowing for “the capacity of creativity (to) be generated without necessarily using cultural workers; creativity for economic innovation and

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content that makes the platforms and sites of Web 2.0 valuable, further eliminating the need for paid cultural work online.

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Chapter 5: Music

Cultural products are a way to gain insight into the conditions, values, and history of a culture, and music is no different. Its intrinsic properties and place within culture and identity make music an interesting, albeit complicated, lens through with to examine ownership.

Music, in and of itself, is not a physical object. It can be anything from a whistle to orchestral rhythms. As long as it is deliberately ordered sound, it is music – but even this is up for debate. Identifiable groups can convey their culture through it. As Steven Naylor wrote in “Appropriation, Culture and Meaning in Electroacoustic Music: A composer’s perspective”: “The most conspicuous examples of sonic cultural expressions are human speech and musical performance.” (110) It travels easily, making it a common representative for cultural identity. Music’s container is often as important as the music inside it, and the shifting shape of its container following changes in technology tells a lot about how we think of, and deal with, music. As

Stephen Davies noted in “Versions of Musical Works and Literary Translations”, “where a medium-specific piece is adapted to a new medium, as when a nineteenth-century symphony is rewritten for the piano, the result is a distinct work…” (87)

This can be seen throughout the history of music, which tells the story of humans’ desire for music to become more and more portable. From sheet music and the phonograph, to the LP, cassette, CD, and then the mp3, music has steadily become smaller, faster, and less traceable. But why is it important that music is portable? Firstly, because music is a method of communication. Whether this is in protest, cultural

display, or spiritual practice, music is inherently social and community based. Secondly, because portability makes music more profitable. The more people who purchase a vinyl LP, CD, mp3, or hear a song streamed, the more money there is to be made either from that sale or tangential sales.

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5.1 Music as cultural object

Often a pattern of style of music emerges when people are in one space, constantly interacting, creating music, sharing music, performing together, and, as a result,

influencing one another. The unique musical traditions and instruments that develop in various locations, climates, and geographies result in distinct aesthetic styles, called a genre. Genres have traditionally been born from close geographic proximity, and

become a part of a culture’s identity. In the same way culture is socially produced, so is music.

These ideas are most notably explored by Schafer, as referenced above, who introduced the concept of “sound marks”: “The term sound mark is derived from landmark and refers to a community sound which is unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by the people in that community.” (101) Different groups of people with distinct and identifiable cultural identities produce

defined sounds. This, Schafer claims, comes from “The keynote sounds of a landscape are those created by its geography and climate: water, wind, forests, plains, birds, insects and animals.” (101) Keynote sounds are important because “they help to outline the character of men living among them.” (101) As they come to define a culture, these keynote sounds take on meaning. While keynote sounds in nature may have originated the distinct sounds of culture, years and years of socialization between groups have developed these sounds into actual music styles — genres.

So what happens when different groups with distinct cultural and musical identities interact? In the same way hybrid cultures form, so do hybrid genres, by splitting and and combining aesthetics and techniques. There are countless examples, such as Jungle music. Formed in the early 90s UK, Jungle takes its aesthetic elements from classic Jamaican DJ practice originating in Kingston (”There’s a place in Kingston called Tivoli Gardens, and the people call it the Jungle”). (Reynolds 245) British rave artists incorporated reggae bass and dancehall style with their loops, samples, and synthesizers to create a whole new genre. (Gordon) Yet another example is Afrobeat,

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the genre created in the 60s by Nigerian artist Fela Kuti. Formed from funk, jazz, Nigerian highlife, and Jamaican culture and rhythms. (Matos) These new genres often pop up in spaces that allow cultures to constantly interact and share, such as diverse metropolitan areas.

These dynamic aspects of music are exactly why ownership and value come into conflict. How can one exert ownership over something that is as ephemeral as a song can be? Or as amorphous as genre so often is? While it’s important to understand that music is a complex cultural object, it’s also a commodified product._{There are, as} discussed previously in regards to culture, different modes of ownership with music. There is legal ownership, which is exerted through copyright, but also cultural

ownership, which is largely unprotected. The two often conflict. When music is claimed to be a part of a group or individual’s identity but is put up for sale by another, this results in exploitation.

5.2 The Music industry, Pre-Internet

5.2.1 A short history of the music industry

The music industry has attempted to consolidate its power into a hegemonic alignment of major players. Its structure seeks to keep music ownership in the hands of as few as possible, while innovations in music containers have pushed to get it into the homes of as many people as possible as quickly as possible and as far afield as possible. The first consolidation of publishing firms on Tin Pan Alley along Manhattan’s 28th Street coincided with the first wave of home music-playing technology, solidified by the invention of the phonograph, which for the first time “became something that one purchased as _{sound.” (Taylor 3) The industry therefore has long relied on a} concentration of ownership and efficient distribution.

The popularity of the household radio in the 1920’s became a powerful distributor for music, which distribution companies paid to air their songs. (Taylor 3) Around the