Rogueish

Pop music as we understand it simply did not exist in 1932, and we have no right to blindly assume it will continue to exist as we know it indefinitely. At almost every level the means to produce, distribute, obtain, and consume/absorb (and then discuss/dissect) art has been transformed in the last half century.

I’ve been thinking about this, and the relationship between pop music as an aesthetic form and the music industry as an economic form. The tight connection is indeed what I like about pop music - its production is so closely connection to capitalism that it is uniquely well positioned to comment on capitalism. Pop music really began to exist along with Fordism; are the music industry’s current troubles the result of the end of Fordism finally catching up with it? And if that is the case, will pop music cease to exist along with the music industry? I wonder if, in something like the same way the hippie-tech culture of Silicon Valley became the model for late-neoliberal capitalism in general, ways of producing and distributing music outside the mainstream of the industry, such as Creative Commons netlabels, might provide the model for the future of the music industry. And these outsider forms of music distribution generally have a kind of small-scale, DIY, artisanal style which might fit well with the flex-spec ideology of post-Fordist capitalism, but is unlikely to produce the kind of towering industrial-colossus aesthetic of, say, a Britney Spears.