Synopses & Reviews
iTunes. Spotify. Pandora. With these brief words one can map the landscape of music today, but these arenandrsquo;t musicians, songs, or anything else actually musicalandmdash;they are products and brands. In this book, Timothy D. Taylor explores just how pervasively capitalism has shaped music over the last few decades. Examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of music, he offers an incisive critique of the music industryandrsquo;s shift in focus from creativity to profits, as well as stories of those who are laboring to find and make musical meaning in the shadows of the mainstream cultural industries.
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Taylor explores everything from the branding of musicians to the globalization of music to the emergence of digital technologies in music production and consumption. Drawing on interviews with industry insiders, musicians, and indie label workers, he traces both the constricting forces of bottom-line economics and the revolutionary emergence of the affordable home studio, the global internet, and the mp3 that have shaped music in different ways. A sophisticated analysis of how music is made, repurposed, advertised, sold, pirated, and consumed, Music and Capitalism is a must read for anyone who cares about what they are listening to, how, and why. and#160;and#160;
Synopsis
The aim of
Music and Capitalism is to add to the small but now fast-growing number of works that have appeared in the twenty-first century on capitalism in an effort to restore it as an important, and, Tim Taylor would say,
the most important, site of cultural analysis. Taylor has organized this book around concepts and cases that show how Euro-American capitalism works, and has worked, with respect to music. Some of these cases focus on moments when new communications or other technologies appear that altered peopleandrsquo;s relationship to music; various recording and playback devices such as digital recording and playback; and others that address questions of marketing and advertising, for these practices are potent in inflecting or even assigning meanings to commodities of all kinds.
Taylor takes up where Adornoandrsquo;s work left off by studying music in todayandrsquo;s andldquo;new capitalism,andrdquo; which has been powerfully shaped by neoliberal ideologies and policies. Taylor focuses on the new modes of the production and consumption of music, new forms of the marketing of music and musicians, and changes in the cultural industries. These and other themes are treated in this synthetic work that draws on the empirical research Taylor has conducted for nearly two decades on music and technology, the history of broadcast music, the use of music in advertising, and the globalization of popular musics.and#160; It promises to be of interest to anyone with a stake in music.
About the Author
Timothy D. Taylor is professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of several books, most recently
The Sounds of Capitalism, also published by the University of Chicago Press.