PAN RECORDS
A digital journey through the
ethnic music niche
written by Théo Pavlović
2019-2020
Under the supervision of Dr. Bart
Barendregt
With great help from Bernard
Kleikamp
Thesis submitted for Leiden
University’s MSc in Cultural
Anthopology and Development
Sociology, with a specialization
in Policy in Practice
This ethnography is accompanied by a playlist containing different tracks
that can illustrate the argument. It is available
here
and shortly
com-mented
here
.
Student: Théo Pavlović (s2587106)
pavlovic.theo@gmail.com
Supervisor: Bart Barendregt
Abstract
This thesis is an ethnography focusing on the practices and reactions of some of the actors of the Dutch ethnic music niche in response to digital shifts in the music in-dustry. It relies on fieldwork conducted at and through Pan Records, an ethnic music label where I was an intern for three months in 2020. Through several anthropologi-cal methods, I shed light on the modalities through which the producers, musicians, ethnomusicologists and archivists I have met integrate recent digital technologies to their activity. For this purpose, I successively assess the impacts of these tech-nologies on production, distribution, and scholarly work in the ethnic music niche. The results obtained suggest that digital shifts have opened new opportunities for creation, diffusion, and collaboration in the niche, while they are also imposing sub-stantial practical and financial constraints on the actors that participated in the research.
Keywords: ethnic music niche, ethnomusicology, musical digitalization, stream-ing, digital globalization, world music
Résumé
Ce mémoire est une ethnographie traitant des pratiques et des réactions de différents acteurs de la niche néerlandaise de la musique ethnique en réponse aux transfor-mations digitales de l’industrie musicale. Il s’appuie sur une recherche de terrain conduite au sein de Pan Records, un label de musique ethnique dans lequel j’ai ef-fectué un stage durant les trois premiers mois de l’année 2020. À travers plusieurs méthodes anthropologiques, je mets en lumière les modalités à travers lesquelles les producteurs, musiciens, ethnomusicologistes et archivistes que j’ai rencontrés intègrent les technologies digitales à leurs activités. Pour ce faire, j’évalue succes-sivement les impacts de ces technologies sur la production musicale, la distribution commerciale, et les travaux académiques au sein de la niche musicale dont il est question. Les résultats obtenus suggèrent que les transformations digitales ont ou-vert de nouvelles opportunités créatives, collaboratives, et de diffusion pour la niche, mais aussi qu’elles imposent d’importantes contraintes pratiques et financières aux acteurs qui ont participé à cette recherche.
Mots-clés: niche de la musique ethnique, ethnomusicologie, digitalisation musi-cale, streaming, mondialisation digitale, musiques du monde
Acknowledgments
Firstly, I would like to warmly thank my supervisor Bart Barendregt, who has greatly helped me in developing my research and finding my internship, and has always provided me with relevant advice. I am also grateful for my Master’s teaching team, composed of Jan Jansen, Sabine Luning, and Mark Westmoreland. They gave me well-built, innovative and high quality classes about anthropological theory and methods.
Secondly, I could not have conducted this research without Bernard Kleikamp’s benevolence and guidance. He kindly integrated me to his label, and worked so that I could do everything I aspired to for this fieldwork.
Thirdly, I would like to express my gratitude to all my research participants, who shared their experiences with me and graciously allowed me to interview them. Lastly, I am thankful for my family, who has allowed me to come this far and supported me throughout this Master’s degree.
Contents
List of Figures vi
List of Tables vi
Introduction 1
1 Globalization in the digital era 4
A Global ambivalences . . . 4
B Digital melodies . . . 8
2 Framing the case 13 A The story of Pan Records . . . 13
B Tracing social networks . . . 14
3 Pan Records in theory 17 A The folk revival . . . 17
B Understanding world music and ethnic music . . . 20
C Defining the niche . . . 24
D The social life of recordings . . . 26
E Ethnic music biographies . . . 30
Research question 34 4 Methodology 35 A Not so accidental encounters: research as an intern . . . 35
B Approaching experts . . . 37
C Approaching consumers . . . 39
D Online quantitative analysis . . . 42
5 Producing ethnic (and folk) music in 2020 46 A New and old productions at Pan Records . . . 46
CONTENTS v
B Pan Records, the digital, and the archive . . . 50 C The Dutch folk music scene in 2020 . . . 53
6 Selling ethnic music in the digital era 57 A Pan Records in the servers . . . 57 B Mapping Pan Records on digital platforms . . . 60 C Approaching a younger public . . . 67
7 Scholarly developments 73
A Current perspectives in ethnomusicology . . . 73 B Professional archives . . . 76
Conclusion 80
List of Figures
1 Discogs User Interface. . . 44
2 Spotify User Interface. . . 44
3 Distribution of Pan Records’ releases by style names on Discogs. . . 61
4 Discogs ratings of Pan Records’ releases over the years. . . 62
5 Average of song feature values for each studied cluster on Spotify. . . 67
List of Tables
1 Suggestion values of Pan Records releases on Discogs. . . 632 Fifteen most frequent style denominations for each Spotify cluster. . . 65
Introduction
In September 2020, I joined Leiden University’s Master’s degree in Cultural and Development Sociology, in the Policy in Practice track. This specific track meant that I would conduct my fieldwork in the context of a research internship. I was subsequently taken in at Pan Records, an ethnic music label based in Leiden since 1976, headed by Bernard Kleikamp. I decided to focus my ethnographic inquiry on the ways in which Bernard Kleikamp and the ethnic music actors I met throughout the internship accommodated the transformations brought about by digital shifts in the production and consumption of music.
Relevance of the case
Digital technologies can be simplistically defined as creating “new possibilities of convergence between what were previously disparate technologies or content”, as Miller and Horst (2012, p. 5) contended. They open almost an infinity of new possibilities for connection between things, individuals, groups, and cultures, which gives them an inherently global flavor. The realization of some of these possibilities has deeply impacted the musical sector. On one hand, digitalization1 is deemed to
stimulate creative and economic freedom for artists of all popularities, and on the other it could reinforce a top-heavy, unequal, and exclusive dynamic in the music industry (Nordgård,2018). Assessing how this ambivalence translates in the realities of independent actors makes for a very appealing ethnographic endeavor.
Indeed, the music industry is not a monolithic bloc encompassing a homogeneous set of actors with common practices. It covers many different realities and relation-ships, warranted by a variety of musical genres, locations, popularities, as well as cultural and social connotations. The most visible part of this plural industry is naturally the most popular and sizeable, with superstars and major labels. How-ever, a large part of its actors are hidden in the minutia of subgenres, niches, and
1Throughout this thesis, I will use the term digitalization to designate the social and cultural
processes that are triggered by digital technologies, whereas I will use the term digitization to designate the mechanical process through which analog content is translated to binary code (see Bloomberg,2018).
2 INTRODUCTION
independent structures. Their realities are as interesting as those of more influential agents. Knowing how they are transformed by the digital can only better one’s un-derstanding of the impact of these technologies on the music business. Yet the great diversity of independent actors makes it so that for many of them, approaches to digital shifts have not yet been looked into, as studies on the topic could only start quite recently. The individuals I met through my experience at Pan Records are some of these actors, and much can be learnt from looking into their perspectives.
Furthermore, the ethnic music niche appeared to be a particularly propitious field to develop an anthropological study about how independent actors of the mu-sic industry adapt to and adopt digital technologies. Indeed, ethnic music and ethnomusicology appear to be the most anthropological components of the musical field, or at least the most anthropologically studied. They hold questionings about authenticity, the local, and the global at their core. Followingly, ethnic music nat-urally stands out as a relevant study object for a contemporary anthropology of globalization. The ethnography presented below is thus inherently connected to a current zeitgeist of digital globalization and can offer novel anthropological insights in this context.
Analytical layout
In the first chapter, I explore the general context of digital globalization in which I will develop the ethnography. For this purpose, I highlight the tensions and ambiva-lences that define the current momentum of globalization, notably in the cultural sector. I then define the digital and link it to this momentum, before giving an overview of the most salient impact of digital technologies on the musical sector.
In the second chapter, I frame Pan Records’ case in more precise terms, and I present the interlocutors I met throughout this fieldwork.
In the third chapter, I look at more specific theoretical areas and debates that are connected to Pan Records’ activities and the musical actors that inform this ethnography. I thus delve into the story of folk and the folk revival, the discourse of world music, the ethnomusicological discipline, the definition and organization of a musical niche, the social life of recordings approach inherited from material culture studies, and the specific implications of this approach for ethnic music.
In the fourth chapter, I lay out the methods I employed, the reasons that led me to them, and the ordeals they faced me with. I alternately used participant observation, qualitative interviews, and online quantitative analysis. Additionally, I reflect about the communicative contexts I conducted my research in.
INTRODUCTION 3
I then analyze my findings, split into three chapters, each corresponding to one aspect of digital impacts on the ethnic music niche. In the fifth chapter, I inquire into how digital shifts in music have transformed the modalities through which projects are created and produced in the niche, by describing and reflecting upon Pan Records’ production practices as well as the contemporary experiences of folk musicians.
In the sixth chapter, I look at how digital technologies have transformed the dis-tribution, sale, and consumption of music in the niche. For this endeavor, I notably used interviews of young digital music listeners, and big data analysis through the Application Programming Interfaces of digital music platforms.
In the seventh chapter, I try to understand the perspectives taken by scholars of the ethnic music niche, that is to say ethnomusicologists and musical archivists.
Chapter 1
Globalization in the digital era
A Global ambivalences
Globalization is a totem of current times, often considered as an all-powerful force breaking down the world’s barriers, for better or worse. Yet the different parts of the world started to connect long before the 20th century. The silk road economy, colonial conquests, and many other historical developments are a show of that. The global scale already existed. But it is only in the second part of the 20th century that it started becoming this pervasive, and in the 1990’s that it came in fashion as the process defining the postmodern era (Tsing, 2000). A combination of two definitions does well in capturing the colloquial sense of the word: globalization is “the development of closer economic, cultural, and political relations among all the countries of the world as a result of travel and communication becoming easy” (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.), as well as “a situation in which available goods and services, or social and cultural influences, gradually become similar in all parts of the world” (Cambridge Dictionary,n.d.).
Many issues raised in this ethnography cannot be fully grasped without under-standing their ties to cultural, digital, and more specifically musical globalization. Inquiring into several aspects of this context is thus necessary to build a coherent picture. A first step is to look at the plurality contained in global discourses.
Diverse globality projects
Anna Tsing (2000) highlighted that there is not one single narrative for global-ization, but rather several “globality projects” that propose competing imaginative landscapes and assume different interactions between the local and the global. It is a focus on units of scale and the power relations between them that characterizes
CHAPTER 1. GLOBALIZATION IN THE DIGITAL ERA 5
the current globalization momentum, and underlies constructed world systems. The neo-liberal ambition of a fully interconnected and free market is of course powerful among these projects, but it is not at all the sole thrust for globalization. Ultimately, what Tsing’s reflection says about the latter is that the phenomenon is very difficult to identify and frame precisely. It can only be defined by its ambivalence. Global discourses oscillate between several dichotomies. They try to bridge the distance between the local and the global, of course, but also between authenticity and hy-bridity. Ideations of rural purity and tradition are contrasted with urban lifestyles, cosmopolitanism, and fast-paced communication. Followingly, these discourses also oppose the group and the individual, as well as the premodern and the postmodern. Several globality projects inform this ethnographic study. World music discourse is one of them, structuring itself around an ambivalence between universalism and a fascination for difference. Digital technologies, on their part, push several different projects. It is impossible to dissociate the digital from globalization. The motives behind their development are often intertwined with global dreams, and their pos-sibilities for infinite new connections fuel global imaginaries.2 Of course, they did
not trigger the process of globalization, which started decades before they came to mesh with every sphere of society and human lives. Yet they represent a new step in the world’s coming-together. They allow markets to fuse even further, and can reach masses of new consumers. They may also reinforce dynamics of homogeniza-tion. Mass media existed before (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992), but are now taken to a whole other level, as it became possible to sell them or broadcast them it to almost the whole world at once. However, the digital cannot be simply summarized by its ties to neo-liberalism. It is participating in and accelerating the reconfiguration of place and deterritorialization characterizing the global individual (Gupta & Fergu-son, 1992), but the consequences of this process go much beyond the global market place and brutal politics of offer and demand. Digital interfaces are also a place to design alternative worlds, create new communities, build networks of mutual help, or create new standards of participation, for citizens of so-called development coun-tries as much as in the western world (Barendregt, 2012). In the end, the digital crystallizes admirably the ambivalences of globalization.
Salvage accumulation in the artistic world
When focusing on how globalization specifically impacts the cultural industries, an-other concept coined by Anna Tsing is useful. The idea of salvage accumulation
2Being an initial building block of the Internet and digital technologies, the name World Wide
6 1.A. GLOBAL AMBIVALENCES
sheds light on the relationships that unfold between the neo-liberal project of the globalized economy and artistic products (Tsing,2015). She developed the reflection in her ethnographic novel about the commerce of rare mushrooms, but it is valid for many different goods and services transported through global economy. The factory models of modern capitalism are extremely standardized and constraining, but they provide guarantees for workers, such as fixed wages or insurance. Salvage accumu-lation is the process through which it becomes possible for capitalism to exceed the limits of these models. Production does not have to be controlled anymore. The product simply has to be translated into commercial value once it exists. Economic globalization is made possible by this kind of translation, which allows the market to further its reach, leaving neither thing nor place outside its scope.
The artistic world holds peculiar relationships with the market, and followingly with salvage accumulation. The paradigmatic version of the artist assumes that his or her primary purpose is art itself, superseding mundane preoccupations. The ideal artist lives as an ascetic dedicated to creation (Sapiro, 2007). This implies a dichotomy between economic and artistic profit. It is of course a simplistic definition as artists have to earn enough money to sustain themselves like everyone else, thus selling their creations or seeking support from commercial actors. But it is undeni-able that art is not traded like any other commodity. It initially deals in aesthetic rather than in economic value. Art holds ambivalent relationships with the market, because it is connected to a discourse of creative freedom that appears incompatible with capitalist logics. Because art’s purpose is in the aesthetic rather than in the monetary, it was partially spared by profitability requirements, existing outside of the market.
Nevertheless, salvage accumulation is heavily involved in the current shifts of the cultural industries. Before, creative labor needed support from established struc-tures in order to be sustained. Whether or not it was intended to yield a profit, funding artists was a substantial investment. A movie needed a studio, a song needed a label, and a writer needed a publishing house (Pang, 2015). But creation has become as easy and diverse as ever. The necessary tools have become a lot more accessible, and it is now possible for artists to bypass the standardized structures and institutions that used to condition creation. For instance, as cameras have be-come cheaper and easier to find, anyone can shoot a movie, without the need for a production company and substantial funds behind them. This phenomenon is exacerbated in music, as an individual with the right skills can nowadays produce a professional-sounding song without the need for any external help, and with very
lit-CHAPTER 1. GLOBALIZATION IN THE DIGITAL ERA 7
tle resources.3 Parallelly, neo-liberal dynamics have pushed artists to become more
autonomous and rely on themselves instead of supporting structures and communi-ties (McRobbie, 2002; Pang, 2015). All the labor produced by these independent, low-profile, and scattered artists is more and more easily integrated into the market. New business practices and platforms allow commercial actors to generate profit from artists without having to fund their creative labor. Freelance contracts and digital self-distribution take a notable part in this. The commercial actors involved with self-entrepreneurs find themselves in an enviable position: the workers take all the risks, but they can get some of the profits (McRobbie, 2002; Pang, 2015). At first sight, this deregulation of creative labor might seem to allow more freedom for artists, as they do not have to take into account the preferences of a patron, or a company that supports them. But more often than not, this can lead them into precarity, as they work without any guaranties. This is the totalizing effect of global capitalism. Through increased interconnections and diversified business practices, it manages to translate everything and everywhere to its own system of value, hiding behind chimeras of autonomy and professional freedom.
Increasing the world’s tempo
Acceleration is a relevant concept to expand these global narratives, as it highlights a persistent influence of speed on all the phenomena mentioned until here. Speed seems a particularly adapted concept to frame musical studies, as rhythm and tempo are inherently related to it (Armitage, 1999) and form the base of almost all if not every musical practice. Paul Virilio (1977) coined the term “dromology” to underline the importance of speed in history. Indeed, if history can be understood in terms of economic evolution, as emphasized in Marxist theory, it has also unfolded around increasing speed. “If time is money, as they say, then speed is power” (Armitage,
1999, p. 35). This accelerating effect of globalization is evident in the cultural industries. The labor market has become more unstable and fluid (McRobbie,2002), and virality is an extremely powerful tool, if not a must. This evolution of the sector is undoubtedly connected to the effects of digital transformations.
New technologies of information are indeed the pinnacle of acceleration. The digital transformations delineated below clearly involve increased speed, be it in terms of access to cultural products, or of distribution for creators and commercial actors. The internet is enabling instantaneous connection to cultural products and between individuals no matter where they are from, thus contracting time inside the guiding frame of globalization. Acknowledging this dialectic of globalization-infused
8 1.B. DIGITAL MELODIES
speed seems helpful when trying to understand the shifts cultural industries recently went through.
B Digital melodies
Nowadays, the digital is omnipresent in western cultural industries, and beyond. The precise boundaries of the concept are sometimes hard to identify, for it has various usages and its ramifications are plenty.
What is the digital?
In a broader understanding, it appears to refer to the wave of innovation in the technologies of information and communication that started after the Second World War. Looking at the word’s etymology is also very informative, as it was inherited from the Latin noun for finger. What is digital is what lies at the tip of the finger, needing only the push of a button to happen. This invites a dialectic of instantaneity. For this thesis, I have chosen to use the meaning offered by Miller and Horst (2012, p. 3), which relies on a basic but accurate understanding of the concept. For them, it is “all that which can be ultimately reduced to binary code but which produces a further proliferation of particularity and difference”. Indeed, even though they can be reduced to a mere two numbers, digital technologies open up an im-mensity of opportunities and hazards molding their users’ futures and pasts.
The digital is often considered as an artificial interface for the circulation of information, inauthentic when compared to face-to-face interaction, or other so-called organic ways of communicating Miller and Horst (2012). This assumption relies on a common conception of the digital as virtual, making it seem like it is a world where everything is staged, which is distanced from reality and can only produce a pale copy of it. But it does not have to be less real because it is less obviously tangible. As Miller and Horst (2012, p. 3) assert, “humanity is not one iota more mediated by the rise of the digital”. What is referred to as real-life interactions is as much embedded in culture as digital interactions. However, in digital contexts, cultural constraints are perceived more consciously. This might be because norms are less internalized than in the non-digital ways Miller and Horst (2012). Offering new ways of communicating through a contraction of time and space, the digital is of course different from what existed before it. Neither more nor less spontaneous or authentic, but simply creating new arenas for human lives
CHAPTER 1. GLOBALIZATION IN THE DIGITAL ERA 9
to unfold. In increasing the diversity of human experiences to be understood, the digital thus extends the purview of anthropology.
Digital music and the long tail
A development as consequential as this of course has consequences for the music industry, both in cultural and technological terms, and that is what this thesis is more specifically interested in. Successive technological revolutions have trans-formed the field of recorded music. From the invention of the gramophone to the advent of streaming services, consumer habits and power distribution between the different actors have shifted significantly. Already with the Compact Disc, digital formats impacted the market by further facilitating unregulated copy and dissemi-nation (Janowska, 2011), and digital tools entered studios soon after. But it is the widespread use of the Internet and the so-called dematerialization it is supposed to allow that triggered a digital disruption of the industry’s economic model (Nordgård,
2018). Napster, ITunes, Spotify, and a swarm of their compressed-format-relying brethren successively entered the market. The digital shifts mentioned throughout this ethnography coincide with this last development principally.
The long tail theory, coined by Chris Anderson (2008), forms a useful tool to understand the possibilities brought about by digital disruption, although it only paints a partial picture. The cost of distributing music physically prohibited the offering of music without a significant local audience. Making music available digi-tally is significantly less costly for music professionals. There does not need to be a cutoff point based on profitability anymore, and music can be distributed no matter the size or geographical situation of the audience. Hence the long tail denomination, as virtually an infinity of titles can be offered and the sales curve never goes below a profitability threshold, no matter how small the number of buyers. This conjuncture is supposed to allow various niche markets to emerge and to diversify the music offer. In an optimistic vision, selling “less of more” (Anderson, 2008) would be opening the field to smaller stakeholders and redistribute power at the expense of industrial heavyweight companies (Janowska, 2011; Nordgård, 2018).
However, even though digital technologies create these possibilities of increased openness, the long tail model does not seem to truly translate into reality. The digital music economy is a winner-take-all situation, where international hits attract even more attention than before, and a skewed distribution of revenue and influence remains (Mulligan, 2014). This could be explained by an “incomprehensible range of offers” (Nordgård,2018, p. 39). As the number of options increased dramatically,
10 1.B. DIGITAL MELODIES
it may become hard to make a choice, and this ultimately leads listeners back to a small number of established superstar acts.
But while it may not bring better livelihoods to small artists, digital innovations still allow tremendously easier production of music and access to the public compared to before (Janowska,2011). If assessing new power distribution remains delicate, it is certain that the consumer massively gained in offered diversity and opportunities for discovery as more music can be produced, made available, and shared.
The reign of streaming
Considering the impact of streaming adds another layer to these systemic trans-formations. Streaming services offer a possibility for free access to music, or for unlimited consumption for a fixed price in their Premium versions. Consumers do not own tracks and albums anymore, but streaming enables them to access a gigantic amount of available music (Kischinhevsky et al.,2015), from everywhere. This fea-ture is reflected in the slogans of some of the main players in the streaming domain, such as Spotify’s “music for everyone”, or Soundcloud’s “Hear the world’s sounds”.
The possibilities offered by streaming should also be intuitively leading to a re-duction of piracy, that would be beneficial to right holders (Marshall,2015). Indeed, illegally procuring music is supposedly becoming more costly than using streaming services. However, the most influential right holders are the dominant recording companies. Their favorable reaction (Marshall, 2015) to these services can appear as an attempt to bring listenership back in their control by reinforcing regulation of intellectual property and stopping free flows of information (Caetano,2016; Kischin-hevsky et al., 2015). Piracy leads to considerable financial losses for creators and distributors, but the listening practices it entailed were kept out of the hold of the overpowered players of the industry. The current alliance between Spotify, a stream-ing market leader, and the traditionally powerful actors of distribution could indeed suggest that the growth of streaming is a concealed power move from these actors (Caetano, 2016).
Nevertheless, there are also platforms whose purpose is mainly to act as pro-moters of musical democratization and artist freedom, and do not have dominant industrial interests riding on them. Soundcloud and Bandcamp can for instance be characterized as “site[s] for ‘alternative’ music” (Hesmondhalgh et al.,2019, p. 10) or “ ‘producer-oriented’ platforms” (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2019, p. 2), providing a free distribution and promotion channel as well as a dedicated solution for independent creators.
CHAPTER 1. GLOBALIZATION IN THE DIGITAL ERA 11
Streaming is also changing the locus of rentability for music professionals. With the full-access offered by music streaming services, the revenues coming from the distribution of recordings are substantially lower. One stream reportedly earns about half a cent (Meier, 2015, p. 405), which will be split if there is a label or other actors involved besides the original creators and interprets of the music. The hope of streaming relies on the fact that as the amount of paid subscription rises, more money will be available for the platforms to redistribute to the creators, and the payment rate will increase . In the meantime, distributing recordings has become less profitable than when consumers truly bought them. To make up for this, other sources of income have to be emphasized. Live shows, merchandise, and sponsorship have become prominent (Meier, 2015; Nordgård, 2018, pp. 28-31; Brandellero & Kloosterman,2016). Indeed, when they invest in such activities and products, fans yield a much higher revenue for the artist than when they simply listen to the music online. Therefore, artists have to build brands for the public to engage with. The digital zeitgeist in music is renewing the importance of marketing. Majors saw there an opportunity to reassert their position. They now offer ‘360 deals’ that cover each and every aspect of the career of an artist, using their high-profile status and skilled workforce to attract audiences (Meier,2015). Independent and smaller-scale artists, on their part, are confronted with a new hurdle, that sustains inequalities. The costs of producing and circulating the music have clearly diminished, but building a brand becomes necessary to secure enough income, and they might not be able to gather the means and resources for it.
Shifting power dynamics?
In any case, this digital interplay brought out new influential actors of the music industry. Whereas the majors [namely Sony, Universal, and Warner in the current industry (Nordgård, 2018)] were in almost total control of distribution and promo-tion in the 1990’s, they now have to deal with digital platforms that account for a significant part of musical audiences. But even though power is more distributed nowadays, this does not mean that independent artists are finding more profitable situations, and they might even earn less than before in some cases (Nordgård2017,
2018). The music industry remains top-heavy, and powerful actors of the value chain have kept an influential position, but the advent of digital techniques4 and
then streaming still “reallocated functions and responsibilities within existing struc-tures” (Nordgård, 2017, p. 157). The current situation sees quite some bargaining
4I will use the locution digital techniques throughout this ethnography to refer to the wide array
12 1.B. DIGITAL MELODIES
between digital platforms, majors, and artists around problems of fair remuneration, consumer reach, and market inequalities. Independent artists seem poorly armed to make themselves heard in these debates, but have also found new channels of expression.
This shifting configuration is of course also impacting the production of music in non-western and so-called subaltern countries. Before digital techniques, artists had to find a corporate structure that would support their creation and promote their music to outside audiences, and if they wanted to break out of their home country, they had to rely on occidental actors. With digital techniques, artists can try to reach listeners all over the world without the need for support from an established company. The deterritorialization and uncertainty of revenue entailed by the digital transition also means that producers have less incentives to attract local artists to their roster (Brandellero & Kloosterman, 2016).
Digital technologies can even act as catalysts for indigenous cultural activism, serving movements for self-determination and recognition (Ginsburg, 2012). How-ever, unequal access to the internet in the so-called developing world sometimes hin-ders the announced artist emancipation (Nordgård, 2018, p. 36). For non-Western creators, digital techniques can allow more independence and connections but first they have to be accessible. Even when they are, their potential for creating income through music is very uncertain.
Chapter 2
Framing the case
Before inquiring into the theoretical debates that I encountered at Pan Records, exploring the methods I used to conduct my fieldwork, and analyzing my findings, it is essential to frame the specificities of the case more precisely. I will hence show why this particular case allowed me to get insights into the ethnic music niche’s response to global challenges of digitalization. Pan Records’ long history and the relationships Bernard Kleikamp built have indeed guided my path through the ethnic music niche and partially determined my encounters with respondents and personalities.
A The story of Pan Records
The story of Pan Records starts with the formation of a band in the 1970s, during the Dutch folk revival. King’s Galliard made folk music in The Hague, but they were not managing to find a record label to produce them. At the time, distributing records was a costly endeavor. If less than five thousand copies of a record were sold, it would not allow the label to recover the money they invested (B. Kleikamp, personal communication, February 11, 2020). King’s Galliard therefore decided to start their own structure. ThePan Muziekdocumentatie foundation was created in 1976, taking its name both from the Greek shepherd divinity and the eponymous flute. Parallelly, the band organized folk club evenings called De Dansende Beer, happening twice a month in Scheveningen, close to The Hague on the seaside.
Pan Muziekdocumentatie also released music from Ramshackle Stringband, an-other folk band, of which Bernard Kleikamp happened to be the manager. He took growing involvement in the foundation, and eventually became the sole director. Ten years after its creation, Pan Muziekdocumentatie became a commercial com-pany, taking the namePan Records. The renewed label then started releasing ethnic
14 2.B. TRACING SOCIAL NETWORKS
music, which became its primary focus although it always kept close ties with folk music.
Additionally, Bernard Kleikamp created a concert agency called Paradox in 1978, which he also ran, and equipped the label with a publishing branch called Parallax. With these companies, he produced discs and concerts for ethnic and traditional music artists from all continents, thereby building an extremely diverse catalog.
The early 1990s were somewhat a golden age. The zeitgeist was very favorable to world music (Erlmann,1996) and consequently to ethnic music, although the latter spoke to a more restricted audience. Pan Records had considerable turnover, with more than twenty concert tours organized and twenty Compact Discs released each year. The label earned a reputation as a specialized and well-informed distributor, affirming itself as a robust player in the Dutch world and ethnic music scene.5
In 2000, there still were five employees at Pan Records. At this time, however, Bernard Kleikamp felt that the conjuncture for the recording industry started to worsen (personal communication, January 8, 2020). He made his collaborators aware of that, and they started looking for jobs elsewhere. They eventually all left, going to other recording companies, public cultural institutions, or retirement. The label director also highlighted 2008 as a tipping point for the industry, as the global economic crisis made the cultural industries’ situation harder. Paradox organized tours until 2003. Technically, the agency still exists, but has not been active since then.
Currently, Bernard Kleikamp is therefore running Pan Records alone. His office is located in his house’s basement, in Merenwijk, a northern neighborhood in Leiden. He handles all daily tasks there, sending Compact Discs to customers, managing online activities, and working on new productions. Pan Records still releases several albums every year, but the volume has drastically reduced since the 1990s. Bernard Kleikamp however told me that the yearly income he manages to set aside for himself is of the same magnitude as when the company had more turnover, since there is no need to share with employees (personal communication, January 8, 2020).
B Tracing social networks
Bernard Kleikamp has been in the ethnic music business for almost fifty years. Over the course of this long career, he developed relationships with many musical actors.
5Illustrating this, a French magazine specialized in traditional music proclaimed at the time
that Bernard Kleikamp was among the European figures who do impressive work around traditional music (Krümm,1993).
CHAPTER 2. FRAMING THE CASE 15
This has greatly helped me in finding participants for my research, and has thus guided my fieldwork.
Firstly, Pan Records has an extensive network of artists which it produced. Of course, for many the contact has been lost and some do not make music anymore, but there is still a number of artists with whom Bernard Kleikamp has developed friendships which are still lasting today. This mostly concerns Dutch and European musicians, as it is easier to maintain contact, and they often have a long history together. It is in this context that I could meet Frenk van Meeteren and Peer van der Burgh, two folk artists from the Netherlands who were involved in the folk revival, as well as Luciano Maio, a folk musician from Sicily who had been produced by Pan Records.
The label has also been working closely with the world of ethnomusicology for a long time. Bernard Kleikamp is himself an ethnomusicologist. He even has been awarded a second Master’s degree in 2020, focusing on Tibetan studies. The strong ties to academia he developed have in fact led me to doing this internship, as both my supervisor and my methodology professor knew him.
This ethnomusicological orientation also determined a large part of my activities during the internship, and constituted a portion of my fieldwork. Indeed, my main task was originally to look into Ernst Heins’s records, as they were entrusted to the label. He was an ethnomusicologist, pupil of Jaap Kunst (see 3.B), who specialized in Indonesian and gamelan music. 6 He notably lectured at the University of
Amsterdam, substantially contributing to the development of the discipline in the Netherlands. When I started at Pan Records in January 2020, I went through different cassettes and DVDs from his personal collection, that mostly focused on Bali and Java with gamelan7 music and wayang8, but also included recordings from the Balkans and the Netherlands.
This work led me to several encounters. I could meet Ernst Heins’s daughter Marleen, to discuss the future of her father’s records, as well as Barbara Titus. She is Ernst Heins’s successor at the University of Amsterdam, currently teaching ethnomusicology. In fact, I met her for the first time in a symposium about popular South-East Asian music, that was organized by my supervisor Bart Barendregt, but she also knew Bernard Kleikamp and collaborated with him. I was invited to come to her office in Amsterdam to discuss Heins’s collection and do an interview with
6See, for example, Heins,1970; Heins,1975
7The word gamelan designates traditional Indonesian orchestras which usually rely on
percus-sion, notably gongs and metallophones, but can also include strings and singing.
8Wayang is an Indonesian shadow theater. It uses finely decorated puppets, and is generally
accompanied by a gamelan orchestra. Wayang was notably recognized as part of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO (n.d.).
16 2.B. TRACING SOCIAL NETWORKS
her, as she is in charge of material inherited from Jaap Kunst9 and therefore very
familiar with this kind of archives.
More indirectly, my work around the Ernst Heins archives allowed me to talk to Felix van Lamsweerde, who was also a pupil of Jaap Kunst. Bernard Kleikamp and I needed to borrow him gear for reading Video8 cassettes from the collection and he invited us to look at the Indonesian part of his records. This provided me with an occasion to interview him and thus get hindsight on the current situation of ethnic music, as he is more than 80 years old and has been one of the first Dutch ethnomusicologists.
A second leg of my archival work concerned Wouter Swets, another personality of Dutch ethnomusicology. He specialized in Balkanic and Anatolian music,10 and
formed his own ensemble called Čalgija with other Dutch musicians. Most of the material released by the group was recorded and produced by Pan Records. Af-ter WouAf-ter Swets’s death in 2016, a foundation was created to manage his estate and make sure his substantial collection of recordings and notes would be properly archived. The material was transferred to the Leiden University Library where it was handled by Arnoud Vrolijk, a curator specialized in oriental material. As Čal-gija’s producer, Bernard Kleikamp followed this process closely. He instructed me to catalog the material that was connected to Swets in the Pan Records office, and I went to talk to Arnoud Vrolijk at the Leiden University Library in order to get an update about the advancement of the cataloging work and see if I could be of help. This was of course an opportunity to interview a professional archivist, who could shed light on the ways in which digital techniques have impacted his work with music.
Although my research participants were principally acquaintances of Bernard Kleikamp, there were also a few who were not connected to the label. I notably visited the Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid11 in Hilversum thanks to my
supervisor Bart Barendregt who arranged the meeting. There, I could talk to Harry van Biessum and Gregory Markus, who are professional music archivists.
Lastly, my respondents for student interviews were my own acquaintances. As I was looking for young music listeners that would allow enough time so I could ask all my questions, I organized meetings with students who I knew were interested in music.
9This Jaap Kunst material was formerly kept by Ernst Heins. 10See, for example, Swets, 1968, 1972
Chapter 3
Pan Records in theory
The argument thereafter is informed by several interlacing theoretical areas. As Pan Records distributes ethnic and folk music, I will explore these two denominations, and reveal how they are tied together in the context of world music discourse. Then, I will define what a musical niche is and explain why this concept is relevant for analyzing my findings at Pan Records. Finally, I will use insights from material culture in order to devise and clarify an approach to my fieldwork through the social life of recordings.
A The folk revival
My Sicilian respondent told me he made folk music, but not in the American un-derstanding (Interview, January 23, 2020). His folk was about Sicilian folklore, and not about the English-language music to which the word often refers to. Folk is a synonym forpeople. Hence it is the melodies and messages of his own people in Italy that my respondent wished to convey.
The story of the folk revival
Indeed, two decades before world music rose to the fore, there was a global music phenomenon with aspirations to authenticity at its center. The entanglements of folk music with ethnic and world music are plenty, and they significantly impacted Pan Records’s identity. Understanding how the 1960’s-1970’s folk revival happened can shed light on the formation of world music discourse as well as on Pan Records’s path since the label’s creation.
The concept of folk music, dating from the late 18th century (Ronström,2014, p. 47), originally solidified around a static representation of local identities, which was
18 3.A. THE FOLK REVIVAL
the purview of State institutions. However, it was revived into a more grassroots and popular movement by the 1970’s youth.
Owe Ronström (1998) shows that two sets of factors have triggered this cultural momentum. Firstly, the youth that composed the folk revivalists was the first gen-eration born after the Second World War. There was a fast increase in population and this generation was very numerous. The average life standards increased, as well as the opportunities for studying. There were thus large numbers of increas-ingly educated youngsters, in a society where they had the free time to get into artistic endeavors. Parallelly, the rush towards modernity disconnected much of this generation from rural roots, and they felt that centralized governments and institu-tionally authorized media were trying to control and standardize cultural practices and hobbies.
This situation prompted a search for freedom and cultural originality, through reclaiming authentic local songs and dances. The staged version of folklore promoted in authorized national culture was to be rejected and remolded by crafty musicians and enthusiasts. Instead of listening to the stories displayed in museums, they looked into what they deemed the real keepers of old, and therefore authentic traditions: the lifestyles of their ancestors in rural settings. This birthed an appetite for “living tradition” (Ronström, 1998, p. 40). Not only folk-hungry youngsters could receive songs and dances from their inquiries into tradition, but they also found cherished ways of gathering and approaching social life. The folk revival was then all about participation, living in the moment, and continuously recreating tradition. The movement first developed in the British Isles, where it enjoys exceptional longevity (Keegan-Philips & Winter, 2014; Livingston, 1999), but it soon spread through Europe, leaving few countries untouched.
The folk revival built itself in opposition to global capitalism, tying the re-appropriation of tradition to socialist and alternative ideologies (Keegan-Philips & Winter, 2014). Folk music gained cultural recognition and, in spite of the na-tional sensibilities forming its core in each country, became an internana-tionally shared phenomenon. However, with success came an impulse towards professionalization, commercialization, and eventually institutionalization.
Attracted by folk’s success, commercial actors hopped on the movement. Whereas it primarily relied amateurs and participation at the beginning, stars of folk emerged, and recordings became the most powerful diffusion tool. Festivals also gained con-siderable importance for the genre, with some concentrating on local audiences and artists, and others wielding transnational ambitions (Ronström, 2014). As a result of folk musicians becoming recognized professionals, folk music was progressively
CHAPTER 3. PAN RECORDS IN THEORY 19
integrated in standard music education curricula (Ronström, 1998). This opened the way for generations of professionally trained musicians and folklore scholars. However, with this shift towards institutionalization, folk lost a substantial part of its staged originality and social content. Frenk van Meeteren and Peer van der Burgh, who were part of the folk revival movement in the Netherlands, told me that it started to wane in the 1980’s, after reaching its peak in the country in the mid-1970’s (personal communication, February 27, 2020; personal communication, March 3, 2020). The folk revival’s impetus had faded away.
Folk in hindsight
As he analyzes the movement’s shift, Ronström (2014) demonstrates that folk music shifted from a focus on tradition to becoming heritage after the revival, in a context of increased globalization. These concepts represent two modes of relating to the past. Whereas tradition is rooted in personal ties, bloodline, and a deeply local experience, heritage is everyone and no one’s, and gains its status by being recognized as an exceptional expression of the past. The folk revival relied on a youth turning inwards to local authenticity, in the face of modernity. However, the movement was then permeated by globalization, and its ties to local tradition loosened. It became internationally celebrated as an exceptional cultural phenomenon. Musicians started playing folk music with which they did not have any personal and historical ties. This tension between local authenticity and global consumption ties folk music to world music discourse, and is one of the reasons explaining why it can be considered a part of the world music ecosystem.
Folk has come “full circle” (Ronström, 1998, p. 41) and started another cy-cle. Professionalization and internationalization did not make it disappear, but it eventually dissolved it into a variety of genres. The 1990’s effectively saw some folk musicians turn towards a much more open approach, learning about and mix-ing traditions from all over the world, therefore promotmix-ing world music, quite far from the original aspirations of the folk revival. However, there is still a substantial body of contemporaneously produced music called folk. Indie folk, taken as a broad genre, has notably attracted considerable popular attention, but it does not seem at all to revolve around tradition, local authenticity, and the reclaiming of old so-cialities against modernity. What seems to have been inherited from folk revivalism is an aspiration to independence and participation. The political content has been lost, but indie folk aesthetics still revolve around originality, distancing oneself from the mainstream, and the production of music as a social experience (van Poecke & Michael, 2016). This trope of participation revered by indie folk fan is increasingly
20 3.B. UNDERSTANDING WORLD MUSIC AND ETHNIC MUSIC
connected to digital mediation. Indeed, as they offer many new opportunities for collaboration and communication, digital platforms are privileged arenas for indie folk’s social experiences to unfold (van Poecke & Michael, 2016).
There are however certain ambivalences in the aesthetic and political stances of this genre, which started gaining popularity in the 1990’s and is still going strong today (Hesmondhalgh,1999; van Poecke & Michael, 2016). Indie folk artists do not avoid the commercial cultural economy and profit from ties with institutions and corporations, creating a sort of “alternative mainstream” (van Poecke & Michael,
2016, p. 12). While it takes substantial influences from popular music, the core of the genre is its artists and listeners’ need to assert their opposition to the mainstream and their sophisticated appetite for “truer” music, that can be distinguished from dull over-popular acts (van Poecke,2017). In this, “bottom-up production converges with top-down distribution” (van Poecke & Michael,2016, p. 12). Indie folk assim-ilated the authenticity axiom present in the folk revival, but tackled it differently. The aesthetic and a-political practices of the indie folk community are not built in opposition to modernity, but rather resonate with contemporary postmodern ques-tionings, revolving around the globalization of culture and the standardization of popular taste.
The authenticity concern of the folk revival also resonated with a genre that came in fashion slightly earlier, gathering more diverse and international musical expressions under an elusive appellation: world music.
B Understanding world music and ethnic music
As an ethnomusicologist told me during my fieldwork, “world music is nothing” (F. van Lamsweerde, personal communication, February 11, 2020). Indeed, it is sometimes hard to identify what is and what is not world music. Yet Pan Records undeniably belongs to this sector of the music industry, and it is therefore fruitful to inquire into its characteristics and ambiguities.
World music as a discursive object
Semantics are a good starting point to understand the tensions and theoretical oppositions in world music. Indeed, the use of the very term world is already prob-lematic in itself. Discourse about world music frames the genre around ideas of musical diversity and difference (Feld, 2000). The musical criteria it implies are therefore extremely vague and broad, as it can refer to any music that involves
CHAPTER 3. PAN RECORDS IN THEORY 21
non-Western elements in a context of Western consumption. Followingly, the term does not appear to be analytically adequate (Stokes, 2004, p. 52), because of its inherent ambivalence and ambiguities. On one hand, it is reinscribing a distinc-tion between the West and the rest and can easily be criticized as a device for the consumption of homogenized difference inside an almighty global capitalist system (Erlmann, 1996; Stokes, 2004). On the other hand, the discourse surrounding this genre heavily relies on a celebration of global diversity and “more equitable cultural relations” (Stokes,2004, p. 47). In fact, world music mostly amounts to a discursive space encompassing various types and practices of music.
The structuring narrative of this space is a fascination for difference, universality, and presumed authenticity from the vantage point of a primarily Western listener-ship. This creates a paradoxical situation where music is often celebrated for its authenticity although it has been transformed for an audience foreign to its context of origin (Murphy, 2007). This translates to an “authenticating discourse of hybrid-ity” (Stokes,2004, p. 60). All music is considered hybrid and valorizing authenticity as the emanation of an isolated local culture appears to be essentializing and sustain otherness. However, hybridity can simply take the place of authenticity in inscrib-ing unequal power relations between center and peripheries as it may reify different cultural elements and histories coming from various places into a single universal-izing object serving Western globality (Stokes, 2004; White, 2012). This tension is reflected in the ways the genre permeated global popular culture. Widely successful acts characterized as world music often integrated non-Western traditional music elements into more global styles such as rock or electronica, through the use of sam-ples or collaboration.12 Hybridity narratives then sometimes concealed the unequal distribution of credit and profit between non-Western and Western artists (Erlmann,
1996; Stokes,2004). Indeed, when traditional music elements are repurposed for new songs or activities and become new commercial products, problematic situations of-ten arise where the original creators are not properly mentioned and notified and do not get adequate retribution. It can also be that the original recordings do not give sufficient information about who are the rightful recipients of the profits, because the performers were anonymous, or because the information was lost through time (Zemp,1996).13 The prominence of repurposing and transforming older recordings in world music also attracts attention on the important place that archives hold for
12It is interesting to note here that the term world beat is often used to refer to this kind of
fusion acts, especially in the United States (Biddle & Knights,2007; Feld,1995).
13It may be noted here that this concern comes from the global concept of personal copyright,
which is not universal (Isaac 2011). An alternative to transferring the profits to one specific individual or group can be to invest them in the conservation of the recorded tradition (Zemp,
22 3.B. UNDERSTANDING WORLD MUSIC AND ETHNIC MUSIC
this genre (see 3.E and 5.B).
The tensions underlying these narratives of hybridity highlight the conflicts be-tween the global and the local and bebe-tween diversity and universality that are for-mative of world music discourse. Trying to investigate world music as a coherent entity leads back to a very broad understanding of the field, which appears to be built around anything non-western that can convey ideals of authenticity. Despite this semantic ambiguity, it remains that it is widely used as a self-reifying label for packaging and marketing purposes, and forms a meaningful discursive object crystallizing many debates. It has therefore helped me in framing my research and identifying the position of Pan Records in the music industry. These definitional tensions nevertheless led me to use these words with caution.
The ethnic music genre
To characterize music released by Pan Records, I have purposefully used the term ethnic music and not world music. That is because although the label is clearly part of the world music universe and impacted by its underlying discourse, its position in the music industry can be identified more precisely.
One of the main characteristics of the world music industry is indeed its internal plurality, whether in production or in consumption, and systematic critics often only touch upon a specific part of the field, or its most global components. Indeed, some of the above-mentioned denunciatory treatments do not appear to be relevant in the case of Pan Records.
The music released by the label seems to be mainly composed of field record-ings and traditional music that is not adapted for a western listenership. This is what constitutes the ethnic music subgenre. As opposed to more mixed styles such as ethnotechno or world beat (Stokes, 2004), it is focused on the unaltered musi-cal expressions of ethnic groups (Rice, 2014, p. 3). The term ethnic quite often finds itself between quote marks, as it may be castigated for perpetuating colonial mentalities and making little sense etymologically. Nevertheless, the locution has been and is colloquially used to refer to traditional music from many peoples and lands around the world, in a context where it is distributed to western and global audiences. It implies an opposition to fusion, modern, and global styles (Kvifte,
2001), that may sample or reinterpret some songs pertaining to ethnic music, but are clearly not a part of the subgenre. More specifically, ethnic music appears to be focused on those in subaltern situations, who eventually find themselves threatened by global progress. This explains why it principally covers non-western music,14
CHAPTER 3. PAN RECORDS IN THEORY 23
although it can as well include traditional and forgotten music of the high-income countries of the northern hemisphere. Folk music, in the understanding it had when the folk revival was in full swing, has followingly made its way inside the ethnic music subgenre.
The ethnomusicological discipline
Looking at the substance of the ethnic music genre, it only seems natural that Bernard Kleikamp would work with close ties to the discipline of ethnomusicology, which can be defined as “the study of why, and how, human beings are musical” (Rice, 2014, p. 1). Barbara Titus also defined it as knowledge about “how people make sense of their worlds through sound” when I interviewed her (personal commu-nication, February 21, 2020). Whereas ethnic music is a discrete section of the music industry, ethnomusicology is the academic field that coincides with it. It emerged as a discipline emerged after the Second World War as a transformation of compar-ative musicology, which attempted to provide all-encompassing theories of musical evolution and genealogies (Rice, 2014). Without the same generalizing ambitions, ethnomusicology offered a focus on the role played by music in various cultures, relying on detailed ethnographic analysis and fieldwork. When scholars chose this name for the discipline, it implied that there was no comparative aim anymore and that it was now to be acknowledged as a part of anthropology, thus mimicking the appellation of other anthropological subdisciplines in the United States, such as ethnolinguistics and ethnohistory (Nettl, 2005, pp. 11-12).
Stripping themselves of all value judgments, ethnomusicological practitioners aim at understanding how music impacts and is necessary to human lives, in the diversity of its expressions all over the world. Hence, the importance within the discipline of purely musicological inquiries into tones and notations gradually decreased since the 1950’s (Rice, 2014, p. 21), making way for more anthropological treatments.
At first, ethnomusicology was dedicated almost exclusively to the study of non-Western music, with a focus on recording traditional music and live performances. When Jaap Kunst coined the term ethnomusicology in 1950 (van Zanten & van Roon, 1995, p. 9), as he had started to teach at the University of Amsterdam, he offered this restricted focus as a frame for the discipline, reaching for authentic musical expressions. It was justified by an opposition to apparently commoditized
salvage ethnology approach taken by pioneer anthropologists such as Franz Boas or Alfred Kroeber (see Adams,2016). They aimed at documenting the soon-erased ways of life of Native Americans. The term hence came to designate anthropological attempts at documenting cultures that were on the brink of extinction. Frances Densmore was a notable pioneer of this approach in the musical field (Densmore,1941).
24 3.C. DEFINING THE NICHE
genres in the West, notably popular entertainment genres, that were broadcasted through radio and television and diffused by way of commercial recordings (Rice 2014). One of the reasons for this rejection was that they implied schizophonia, that is to say a disconnection between a recording and its context of production and original cultural environment (Feld,1995; Schafer, 1969).15
Nowadays, the focus is broadened to involve all kinds of music, as they can all tell something about human experiences no matter how supposedly traditional or popular. For instance, some ethnomusicological researchers study local expressions of global genres, or how western tropes of popular music are translated in peripheral spaces (Rice 2014). In principle, there are thus no more exceptions to the universal ambitions of ethnomusicology, whether geographic, cultural, or technological. Sup-porting this, Rene Lysloff wrote that “the ethnographic Other is now fully plugged in” (Lysloff as cited in Rice,2014, p. 104), which implied that the already retrograde authenticity/technology divide had completely lost its ground.
Despite this, the discipline appears to still be mostly producing works on either non-western music or ethnic genres in the West, leaving little room for inquiries European classical music and Western-origin commercial pop. This may be justified by difficulties to conduct fieldwork into these contexts and to access stars of the Western music industry Rice, 2014, p. 103. Expanding such research appears to be one of the final steps towards achieving a comprehensive picture of the cultural meanings of music in the world, although there is always ongoing transformations in music that impact these meanings, as is the case with the spread of digital techniques nowadays for instance.
C Defining the niche
Genre, subgenre, subculture, scene, tribe, niche... All these terms imply a certain approach to the link between social formations and musical habits (Hesmondhalgh,
2005). It is indeed certain that music is divided between categories that are distin-guishable not only because of sonic and rhythmic criteria, but also because of the identities they are associated with and the socialities they feed. It is quite evident that fans of indie folk and gabber enthusiasts will often have a hard time finding common ground in the ways they envision pleasant festivities, social gatherings, and acceptable taste, although there can always be crossovers and free spirits combining the genres.
CHAPTER 3. PAN RECORDS IN THEORY 25
Framing musical socialities
Music is not either reflecting, or constructing social habits. As summarized by David Hesmondhalgh (2005), apprehending the relationships between music and the social rather demands an approach through articulations, that is to say various links between musical forms and social structures, that can more or less tightly associate specific styles with identities and communities. Genre, as the most enveloping of the above mentioned terms, seems the most adequate to capture the socio-musical clusters thereby created (Hesmondhalgh,2005).
Ethnic music clearly is a genre, as distributors, artists, and audiences appear to conciliate around a shared habitus and mindset. Yet I have also chosen to use the term niche in my research, which has a more restrictive meaning. Niches are opposed to themainstream. They can only welcome a limited amount of enthusiasts before losing their status. Genres can be extremely popular, but niches have to stay somewhat confidential. A musical niche wraps a genre, but also implies low recognition, and eventually warrants more precisely defined social practices.16 The digital has a compelling ability to dynamize niches, as it lowers profitability thresh-olds and at least partly realizes the long tail prophecy (Brynjolfsson et al., 2006), thus making space for more varied cultural bubbles to sustain themselves. This does not however mean than every niche can suddenly become profitable and root itself solidly in cultural landscapes.
In its current situation, ethnic music as I have defined it earlier is a niche, since it can hardly be deemed mainstream and is quite restrictively associated with certain practices and mindsets.
Mapping ethnic music
A helpful framework for identifying these characteristics is provided by Öwe Ron-ström (2014). In an inquiry into folk music, he offers a typology of actors involved in the production of music. He highlights three positions: “doers”, “knowers”, and “marketers”. The first dedicate their selves to create, the second to document this creation, and the third to sell it. One individual can of course combine two or the three positions. Although quite simple and valid for most artistic fields, these cat-egories can shed light on the specificity of relationships between actors in a given sector of the music industry. Ronström also shows that this typology can be use-ful to follow the power dynamics structuring the community around a music genre
16This exclusive nature is heavily reminiscent of Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the formation on
26 3.D. THE SOCIAL LIFE OF RECORDINGS
over time, as it goes in or out the mainstream. In his example from the European folk revival, he contends that knowers defined the genre, which was then dynamized and revived by doers, and reached its mainstream prime through the ambitions of marketers (Ronström, 2014, pp. 47-48).
Ethnic music seems to be characterized by a large distance between doers and the two other groups, in geographic as much as in cultural terms, but also by a closeness between knowers and marketers. Indeed, the core of ethnic music is a fascination for sounds from the unknown and faraway, which implies that the context where the music is distributed and documented has to be different from its original context of production. Awareness of foreign cultures and traditions is necessary solely in order to reach the creators. This creates an overlap between marketers and knowers.
This overlap exists for folkloric music as well, as it demands specific expertise, but rather focusing on history and national narratives. However, it is a lot more likely there that knowers and marketers share the cultural and geographic context of the doers. Yet the focus on traditional knowledge and the ties to academia are similar. This contributes to justifying the association of folk music and ethnic music inside a single niche.
Magazines like Songlines, Wereldmuziek, or TRAD and events such as EtnoKrakow and Festival de Confolens, to cite only a few examples, contribute to delineating the specific public of the ethnic music niche. Although their focus is usually not only on the unaltered expressions of ethnic groups and can also include some more fusion-style acts, they attract sizeable audiences whilst dedicating a substantial part of their lineups or pages to traditional artists. Characteristic socialities of the niche notably develop through these platforms.
D The social life of recordings
This thesis’ inquiry can be greatly informed by material culture studies. Under-standing social relations is crucial, but this should not overshadow the importance of material orders and artifacts in human lives (Miller & Horst,2012, p. 24-25). Peo-ple project values, feelings, and expectations onto things, which come to have a path of their own. Exploring and expanding this line of thought, Arjun Appadurai edited his seminal book The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective, in which he draws attention to the social and political processes that allocate value to things (Appadurai, 1986). The worth of things, their commensurability, and their relevance for power hierarchies and privilege relations are indeed constantly
