Monopoly Music
Today’s ruling class treats all culture as either commodity or plaything. We should not accept either definition.
More and more, we fit in our love of music where and when we can. Through our earbuds on the way to work in the morning, in the background while we clean or make dinner, playing softly at our desk to take our mind off the drudgery in front of us. This is in stark contrast to music as event, as celebration, or as catharsis, the way we would be pulled to watch or participate in live performance throughout so much of history. It is a lonely privatization of an inherently social medium.
Like most things, the rich experience music somewhat differently. Think, for example, of Elton John performing at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding for the price of $1 million. Or of Beyoncé’s private concert for the son of Muammar Gaddafi. Or of “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli’s $2 million purchase of Wu-Tang Clan’s one-of-a-kind album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Even the shame and clusterfuckery of Fyre Festival was, we should remember, intended as a gathering of glamour and privilege, with the average ticket costing $1,200.
This is the profoundly undemocratic shape of culture when it is left to the market. But it is more than that. Prior to capitalism and the rise of the commodity form, most art could only be experienced by gaining admittance to domains of the wealthy. Hanging in the palaces of monarchs or in grand places of worship, these works conveyed a sense of aura, of reverence, and, in turn, of divine right. The advent of photography changed all this. As with the printing press, the mechanical reproduction of the image allowed it to travel to wherever the viewer might be. We might say the same of music in the digital age. Now, anyone can access the entirety of recorded music from wherever they are in the world. The sound comes to you, and it is limited only by your ability to pay for a streaming service and your access to Wi-Fi.
But there is a problem, and it is rooted not in the technology of reproduction itself but in who controls it.
In his Ways of Seeing, John Berger builds on Walter Benjamin’s arguments lauding the democratic potential of mechanically reproduced art, inserting into them the caveats of how, in capitalism’s earliest days (and prior to the arrival of photography), the rising merchant classes employed oil painting as a means of showing off their abundance of land and consumable goods. Today, in the age of the digitally copied image, our corollary is the “Rich Kids of Instagram,” flaunting their private helicopters and magnums of Dom Perignon in what Adam Stoneman described several years ago in Jacobin as “a display of braggadocio signifying disdain for cost and a gratification in denying others the experience of wealth rather than sharing it.”
The precapitalist, semireligious “aura” of the art image is replaced not with the flourishing of democratic creativity but with excess and petty upper-class contempt. The objects in the image — the luxury cars, the lavish swimming pools, the idyllic getaways — are subject to the law of exchange and, in theory, could belong to any of us. But they don’t. They belong to them. And we can’t have them.
Music, an entirely different medium, corresponds to different rules. But when both recorded sound and a composed image can be reproduced ad infinitum, they find themselves in tension with notions of authenticity and originality. Anyone can stream Beyoncé’s music, but how many of us can afford the unique experience of having her perform for our closest friends? A die-hard Wu-Tang fan can buy as many rarities and bootlegs as they like, attend as many performances as they can, but the only one who can experience Shaolin is the one who can pay for it.
Music as background noise is more disposable than it has ever been. Music as experience, by contrast, comes at a premium.
There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. While most of us cannot buy a private performance from our favorite artist, we can attend music festivals. Even here, however, we can’t ignore the sharply rising cost of participation. A four-day pass to Bonnaroo, for example, will run you more than $350, while parking and lodging can be several hundred more. Add in travel and the practically criminal markups on meals and water, and the price tag easily approaches $1,500. This is to say nothing of the class divisions such festivals expose when they take over spaces ostensibly for public use or create gilded cages of VIP access. At Bonnaroo, anyone who wants to hang out with the artists in an air-conditioned tent with weekend-long food and drink service had better be ready to drop close to four grand.
It may be fitting, therefore, to understand music festivals as a place where the fissures between commodity and monopoly in music are most threatening, where such holes must be plugged in order to eliminate any entry point for commoning. Even then, they can buckle under the weight of their own contradictions.
Fyre Festival, the “luxury” music festival whose spectacular collapse in spring 2017 provided us with a healthy dose of schadenfreude, is the best-known example of this. But it’s not difficult to see these tensions play out in other festivals. The atrocious condition that Chicago’s Humboldt Park was left in by Riot Fest in 2014 provoked an outcry from the neighborhood’s working-class Boricua community. And the cancellation of several large music festivals in the wake of coronavirus calls into question whether some promoters and other businesses that rely on these events will even survive, which is to say nothing of the toll such a collapse has taken on their employees.
In other words, “music as commodity” and “music as plaything for the rich” constitute each other. We are told our lives will be incomplete without these sounds and experiences, but only those who can afford the purest ones can hope to be truly fulfilled. Music becomes a conduit of glamour, which, as Berger argues, is indicative of “the industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way.”
The radical democratic potential of mass-produced art and music is not only squandered but turned against itself. The downward pressures are already having ripple effects on how working people relate to music. On top of that relationship becoming more and more privatized, it may be creating a different genus of music entirely. In the era of what some commentators are calling “Spotification,” even with artists being paid pennies by streaming services, many still feel pressured to write their songs to conform to an algorithm, so that they might be at the front of the line when listeners are asked, “What would you like to hear next?”
How this continues to evolve is, of course, impossible to tell. But the current economic and cultural trajectory raises the question of whether we may be on the way toward a kind of mass musical apartheid. When we talk of two ways in which the world of music is experienced, how literal can this distinction get? Are we approaching a moment when artists release and perform better or more interesting versions of their music only for the rich? More specifically, how close to this vision are we willing to get before we start to push back?