Event

Eric Drott

A New Political Economy of Music?

February 1, 2022 (Tuesday) — 5:15 pm to 7:00 pm

Lerner Center
Penn Music Building
201 S. 34th Street, Room 101

ABSTRACT 

This talk is about music, capitalism, and how their relations are mutating at present. I begin by considering music’s embeddedness in capitalist markets. But rather than focus exclusively on the recording, publishing, and live music industries, I draw attention to other channels by which music has been tied to capital accumulation, whose importance has grown in tandem with the music industries’ increasing subordination to tech and finance. Under these conditions, the commodification of music recedes in importance compared to its assetization—manifest, for instance, in recent song catalog acquisitions by private equity and pension funds. The second part of the talk turns to the way music’s resistance to standard economic imperatives sets it apart from capitalism. While this has often made music amenable to alternative modes of provisioning (e.g., commoning or gift-exchange), apartness shouldn’t be equated with inert coexistence. On the one hand, capitalism plays a role in constituting its outsides, by defining what does or doesn’t fall within the bounds of the formal economy. On the other hand, as dominant and dominating as capital may be, it is also dependent upon the very outsides it helps define. One example of this dependency is furnished by extra-human nature, which capital treats as a site from which resources can be freely extracted and to which waste can be freely expelled. Another is provided by the sphere of un- or underpaid reproductive work, long segmented along gendered and racial lines. And still another, I contend, is provided by music and culture more broadly, once these are transformed into means of social reproduction. Finally, the end of my talk sketches some possible futures for music beyond capitalism, futures that can nonetheless be discerned from within it, thanks to the way contemporary platform capitalism has driven a wedge between music and the commodity form.

BIO

Eric Drott received his PhD from Yale University in 2001, where he taught prior to joining the University of Texas at Austin. His research spans a number of subjects: contemporary music cultures, streaming music platforms, music and protest, genre theory, digital music, and the political economy of music. His first book, Music and the Elusive Revolution (University of California Press, 2011), examines music and politics in France after May ’68, in particular how different music communities (jazz, rock, contemporary music) responded to the upheavals of the period. He is currently finishing a second book, provisionally titled Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, which examines the material and psychic economies of music streaming platforms. He is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music with Noriko Manabe (Temple University).

Drott has presented papers at national and international conferences, including the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, the International Musicological Society, the Modernist Studies Association, and the International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music. Articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Cultural Politics, the Journal of the Society for American Music, Critical Inquiry, the Journal of Music Theory, Twentieth-Century Music, as well as several collections of essays.

Drott is a recipient of a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2020 he received the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association for his contributions to music research.