Pop Idols and Pirates

Mechanisms of Consumption and the Global Circulation of Popular Music

Charles Fairchild

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754663836
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317078395
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The music industry has been waging some very significant battles in recent years, reacting to numerous inter-related crises provoked by globalization, digitalization and the ever more extensive commercialization of public culture. These struggles are viewed by many as central to the survival of the central mediators in the consumption of popular music. These battles are not just against piracy and the sharing of digital song files on the internet. The music industry is also struggling to find ways to compete or integrate with many other forms of entertainment, including films, television programmes, mobile phones, DVDs and video games in an extremely crowded communications environment. The battles currently being fought by the music industry are about nothing less than its continued ability to create and maintain specific kinds of profitable relationships with consumers. This book presents two inter-related cases of crisis and opportunity: the music industry's epic struggle over piracy and the 'Idol' phenomenon. Both are explicit attempts to control and justify the particular ways in which the music industry makes money from popular music through specific kinds of relationships with consumers. The battles over piracy have been fought with a remarkable collection of campaigns consisting of advice, coercion and argument about what is or is not the best way to consume music. From these complicated and often contradictory campaigns we form an unusually clear picture of what many within the music industry imagine their industry to be. In a complementary way, 'Idol' works to demonstrate the joy and pleasure of consuming popular music the 'right' way. By creating a series of intertwined relationships with consumers around multiple sites of consumption, incorporating television, radio, live performance, traditional print media campaigns, text messaging and all manner of internet-based systems of communication and 'fan management,' the producers of 'Idol' present an ideal relationship between musicians and audiences. Instead of focusing on selling CDs, the music industry's digital Achilles' heel, 'Idol' has given the music industry an integrated platform for displaying its expanded palette of products and venues for consumption. When understood in specific relation to the battle against piracy, Fairchild's analysis of 'Idol' and the emerging promotional cultures of the music industry it exhibits shows how multiple sites of consumption, and attempts to mediate and control the circulation of popular music, are being used to combat the foundational challenges facing the music industry.

PART I
All of the In-between

Chapter 1
The Acts and Spaces of Consumption

Goods … are just physical tokens of a virtual regime (Hiromi Hosoya and Marus Schaffer).1

There is an inevitable distance between the production of cultural products and their consumption. This distance is not just metaphorical, it is literal. Overcoming this distance is no mean feat, but for both retailers and manufacturers, managing it has become a lot more complicated and exacting than it used to be. Between the mid 1970s and the mid 1990s, the ability of retailers and manufacturers to manage the flow of goods evolved significantly, producing more or less integrated systems of automated inventory management that greatly facilitated the spread of consumer capitalism worldwide. One of the first tangible signs of this system was the Universal Price Code (UPC), developed by a consortium of US retailers, distributors, and manufacturers. The now ubiquitous square of numerically identified black lines of varying widths on the back of most products has become “the thumbprint of a good by which its identity is asserted in the realm of information, the wheels by which its travels the infobahn” (Harvard Project on the City, 2002:158). The UPC is the practical embodiment of a system of information management that has had important consequences for the ways in which consumerism has developed around the world. First, automated inventory management systems led directly to an “explosion of inventory and store size.” Prior to the introduction of these systems, the average size of US grocery stores had rested on a clear plateau for decades. After the introduction of the UPC, average store size doubled in a little under 15 years. The UPC system was organized and implemented by some of America’s largest manufacturers and retailers who were able to convince competitors to use their systems of inventory management. Over time, businesses at all stages of the production chain were able to act in a far more cooperative and even collusive manner. The system confirmed a bias towards larger retailers who used the new system to grow dramatically. Second, these systems allowed businesses to use various kinds of coded information collected at the point of sale to “track consumer preferences and behavior almost in real time and react with unprecedented speed.” Prices could be routinely altered throughout the day to enhance competitiveness and improve sales volume. Markets could be segmented with increasingly fine levels of detail based on an extensive range of demographic information gathered at the checkout counter. Consumers could be targeted and reached with far more efficiency and cost-effectiveness (Harvard Project on the City, 2002:157–8; Brown, 1997).

For celebratory commentators, the spread of consumerism has been achieved as the result of a kind of informal democratic referendum. Businesses merely responded to nascent consumer sentiment, we are told, focusing it through quality products offered at reasonable prices, disciplined through the correcting rod of market competitiveness, “liberating” the “natural” human predilection to consume (Twitchell, 1999:22, 272). But the inventory management systems described above were a response to stagnation, not success. Moreover, they were specifically designed to respond to a lack of knowledge about markets, not a surfeit of it. The logistical systems which now track unimaginably large numbers of objects around the world in real time were developed in the clubby atmosphere of ad hoc consortia, not in some imagined pit of competitive enterprise. They were inspired by the failure of that enterprise, directed by the one area of the economy one would assume had the easiest row to hoe, the food industry. The whole point of these systems was to reduce market risk and improve efficiency. But as with any system which produces exponentially increasing amounts of information, uncertainty and risk do not disappear, they are simply transformed (Winseck, 2002). Integrated systems of inventory management did make markets more efficient, but they also made them more crowded. And, while they helped producers, distributors, and retailers keep track of everything they produced and sold, they also increased markets to an intimidating size, making the management of what are euphemistically referred to as “global” markets much more difficult, but potentially, much more rewarding.

The Imperial Condition in Consumer Culture

Doug Henwood has observed that the word “globalization” was barely used in the US press in the early 1980s. It experienced a surge in popularity in the mid 1990s, along with its companion term “the new economy” which emerged from a similar obscurity a few years later (Henwood, 2003:4, 146–8). Despite the incorporation of globalization into the popular and academic lexicon, there are only a few specific commonalities to the many varied understandings of what the term means. Many of the attributes said to define globalization have been around for centuries while others have appeared and disappeared with alarming speed in recent years, such as the “frictionless” speed and efficiency supposedly inherent to the “new economy.” As Henwood shows, at the heart of the lack of clarity regarding this allegedly universal phenomenon is a confusion of taxonomy in which the term globalization often “serves as a euphemizing and imprecise substitute for ‘imperialism’” (ibid.).

As noted earlier, the music industry has three main challenges currently facing it: evolving regimes of globalization, ever more extensive commercialization of culture, and the sometimes reluctant digitalization of the content of its industry. The public statements of most within the industry do not explicitly acknowledge any link between these phenomena. If we are to judge from the actions of many of those in the music and entertainment industries, there is a clear understanding that these three aspects of contemporary consumer culture have provided significant challenges to many of their foundational assumptions. What links these phenomena is that each challenges traditional models of communication and connection on which the entertainment and music industries have relied to create and foster relationships with consumers in the past. As we will see in Chapters 3 and 4, this is in no small measure due to the efforts of these industries to exert specific kinds of control over the distribution and consumption of their products. We will see in Part III that these foundational changes to almost all aspects of the consumption and production of music have presented some remarkable opportunities for new ways of selling it. The “Idol” phenomenon is one such opportunity and we need a set of tools that can account for this vivid manifestation of globalization. Changes in the circulation and production of popular music over the last 30 or so years can help point us towards a distinct model of globalization that can account for how these changes have altered relationships between consumers and producers, conceptually and practically. It can also help us understand how those inside the entertainment and music industries have perceived these changes, altering their market strategies accordingly in order to shape and reshape acts and spaces of consumption

Central to the arguments which follow throughout this book is a concept I call the imperial condition in consumer culture, a concept based on a particular theorization of the role of media communication within the globalization of consumer culture. The dominant uses of the word globalization generally imply a sense of commonality or even universality. Work that bases an understanding of globalization on difference and localization (or more cleverly “glocalization”) often presumes a broad, common set of processes, structures, and practices, arguing primarily about the contestation of textual meaning or struggles over how power affects the infrastructure of production and the experience of consumption (Parks and Kumar, 2003; Carroll and Carson, 2003; Tomlinson, 1991; 2003). Even interpretations of globalization that stress its complexity and contradictions still imply a broadly common logic joining its consequences, even if these consequences do not conform to expectations (see Appadurai, 1996). Instead, I will use a conception of globalization that regards the very possibility of some manner of “global culture” as illusory. I will argue that, in addition to the many existing concerns of globalization, we also need to analyze consumer culture in the ways in which it is continually reproduced through innumerable, specifically formed, and consummated relationships between producers and consumers. These relationships are constructed and maintained through myriad channels of communication. These channels are not only the obvious ones such as films or television shows or even the much lauded contestatory space of the internet. These channels also include everyday acts of consumption, the spaces in which these acts take place, and the mutually constitutive relationships which always exist between the two.

For example, if we consider the act of buying a CD in Sydney, an act I will explore in detail shortly, it is dependent on the existence and maintenance of channels of communication between Sydney and the world that are simply not reproducible elsewhere. The channels of communication that allow a consumer to buy a CD at the Virgin Megastore in Sydney’s Central Business District (CBD) are threaded throughout a context resolutely defined by much wider forces: Australia’s place within world trade and political systems, the fact that the dominant language is English making promotion of some products less complicated than others, the fact that US and British cultural production are proven safe bets, the fact that the Australian music industry is dominated by branch offices of the big multinationals, and the country’s remarkable level of general affluence all constitute the social ground upon which the range and availability of recorded music is based. These factors help determine the ways in which the Australian cultural economy is linked with the rest of the world. The character and quality of these connections informs the extent of the investment the multinational music industry is willing to make in Australia. Understood this way, “the global media” become more specific, still expansive in their reach, still displaying clear objectives, but producing particular consequences which can only be understood through an analysis of the contexts through which these consequences are produced, experienced, and understood. This chapter intends to draw out key aspects of the ways in which the acts and spaces of music consumption are evolving.

For this we have to understand the ways in which specific social and material facts are always inhered within media of communication producing particularities in the ways in which people use and experience them. These filters and funnels appear whether we are talking about the geographic “footprints” that define when and where satellites can be used, or the various legal constructs governing the consumption of film or television, or the technical and economic infrastructures which influence access to the internet. All of these technologies were once spoken of as if they were some kind of universal translators yet they display nothing more clearly than the multiplicity of experience they facilitate specifically because of the ways in which these networks of communication are shaped by the ways in which they are used. Unfortunately, not all users are created equal. We all have relative power based on our means, ability, and inclination to consume, as well as our history and perceived potential as consumers. When we understand communication as the process of establishing webs of social relations within which specific technologies function and through which we participate to produce meaning, then we can understand the kinds of contexts particular types of communication networks produce. To quote Angus (1998), communication technologies are “thoroughly imbued with the specific form of their socio-cultural context” in which they are set and which they help shape. As Angus notes, they are “perceptually and cognitively laden,” helping to organize (not dictate) perception and meaning by producing a shaping context for the meanings of texts and the channels through which meanings are produced and circulated. The meaning of consumption is not limited to textual meaning, however contested, but is shaped by larger forces with specific consequences, intended or not, that have a powerful effect on the kinds of social relationships they produce and help maintain; these relationships are not relationships without our agency and participation.

Without theorizing it directly, the entertainment and music industries rely on an understanding of globalization based on this kind of particularistic use of media. They imagine their markets very literally as a massive collection of actions which they can monitor taken by people they can track and learn about through their actions as consumers. When we see media campaigns for particular products we often see straightforward television ads, press releases masquerading as “news,” posters, street signs, stencils, newspaper and magazine articles, product placements in film and television programs, billboards and internet pop-ups, as well as endless rounds of celebrity gossip print campaigns in the tabloids. These innocent texts are far more strategic and specific than is immediately obvious. The entertainment industry is constantly shaping its messages to reach some of us in as many ways as possible. They are trying to make our participation not so much predictable as probable. The specific streams of communication of which we are the targets are not even established unless a carefully determined level of profitability is predicted, promised, or expected and they are not completed until evidence of our participation returns to its source. It is this literal and material system of contact that is constantly shaping and reshaping ideas on what should be produced, how it should be sold, and where it is most likely to be consumed most often. This is what Oscar Gandy calls a “constitutive system of knowledge” (Gandy, 1993:21). This system of knowledge defines the contours of consumer culture and has a significant impact on what things are produced and how they are consumed.

I define the imperial condition in popular culture, then, by our necessary participation in systems of cultural production over which we can exert power only through the extent and quality of our participation in them. The power of consumers does not extend to the ability to craft the governing structures and ideologies which shape and channel our participation for the benefit of those who do have this power. We do not draft the intellectual property laws grafted into international trade agreements nor do we decide how media regulations are interpreted or enforced. Our power as consumers lies in the benefits and pleasures we draw from consumption. This form of power is a central factor in the continuing maintenance of a set of social relationships created by the things we consume and the people who produce them. It is created largely as an intended, but problematic by-product of these relationships. These relationships pivot around acts of consumption whose outcomes are so difficult to predict with any measure of precision that a Herculean effort is made to take into account all aspects of the spaces in which those acts of consumption happen, even reshaping entire urban and suburban landscapes in the process, a process I will describe throughout this chapter (Harvard Project on the City, 2000). These connections are not formed by some panoptic eye in the sky but within a complex of social relations whose power dynamics are distinctly cast in favor of producers. This is a complex form of cultural seduction, the consummation of which is based on our desire, agency, and ability to participate in systems not of our making, but to which we undeniably contribute. The intent then, is not necessarily to structure our consciousness, but our agency, through the measured and measurable actions we take as consumers. The entertainment industry knows very well that it survives mostly on its ability to mortgage our attention, interests and expectations over time to form them into lasting mutually beneficial consumer relationships; it calls this meeting us halfway.

Globalization and the “Promotional Culture”

Complex regimes of planning and strategy within what Turner et al. (2000) call the “promotional culture” have become of paramount importance to the entertainment and music industries inspired by two undeniable facts of consumer culture. The first and most obvious fact is that the communications environment within which our consumer and advertising cultures work has grown exponentially more complex in recent years. Advertising practitioners and theorists alike are quite explicit about the challenges they face in breaking through the whirl of white noise their industry produces in order to capture and keep our attention and loyalty. Our collective lexicon fairly drips with new terms to describe their efforts: “branding,” “the attention economy,” “viral marketing,” “coolhunting,” and “peer-to-peer marketing” (Gladwell, 2001; Godin, 2001; Henry, 2003; Lee, 2004b; Rosen, 2000). Second, there are now more and more channels through which to produce, consume, and circulate content. Whether we are talking about mobile phones, chatrooms, blogs, video games, or the hundreds of broadcast channels surging through terrestrial and orbiting sources, the traditional models of communication connecting producers and consumers are much less dominant than they used to be. Account planners are now synergists, alchemists of consumerism working arduously across what were previously thought to be unrelated channels of communication planning communicative campaigns of a breadth and complexity that would stun their dark-suited Madison Avenue forebears (Elmer, 2004; Turow, 1997; 2000; McAllister, 1996).

This complexity is unavoidable, not simply because of new technologies, but because of a fundamental shift in the kinds of relationships the entertainment industry has with consumers. As noted, globalization holds out the promise of new markets, but some of these markets are far more valuable than others. Further, systems of market knowledge have become much more sensitive and thus far more capable of picking out desirable demographics from a far wider range of potential targets. They allow producers to pinpoint with unprecedented accuracy those most likely to buy their products. New demographic categories, such as “tweeners” or “challengers,” have proliferated as a result. Target groups are definable by a much broader range of perceived and empirical characteristics than just age or level of disposable income, resulting in increasingly narrow bands of presumed consumer typologies (Henry, 2003; Lee, 2004a). New forms of media and inventive practices of media use have made consumers more “reachable” through a broader range of channels than ever before. New markets and uses for new formats of music are proliferating. In many respects, music is just one more collection of raw materials to be exploited by the entertainment industry. The extraordinarily profitable ringtone, video game, “song placement,” and MP3 player industries have quite simply changed the rules for market creation, penetration, and perpetuation (Coultan, 2004; Emling, 2004; Gotting, 2003a; Lowe, 2003; Petradis, 2004).

As the tools the entertainment industry uses to understand and construct these new worlds of consumption become more and more finely tuned, strategists have been relying on an understanding of globalization that is more specific and material. The entertainment industry does not seem to rely on “global” concepts of globalization, if you will, but on an inchoate and imperfectly expressed understanding of globalization that takes into account material and literal flows of goods, messages, and meanings designed for very carefully targeted and defined groups of consumers. This flexible, practical and contextual understanding of globalization can help us understand how seemingly unrelated phenomena such as the ongoing battle over music piracy and the “Idol” phenomenon grow from the same communicative, technological, and cultural soil. Among the most consequential of “contested terrains” are the spaces in which acts of consumption actually happen.

Acts and Spaces of Consumption

Walk into a store that sells music, these stunning centers for consumable media that litter the landscape, and you cannot help but realize how you have been made into a tiny, but crucial atom of purchasing power right at the heart of a massive infrastructure of production and consumption like nothing the world has ever seen. They know you’re coming and they know what you want to do. You want to purchase some pleasure, a little solidarity. You want to hear someone tell you about a life that you might recognize to be remarkably like your own. There’s music playing, videos humming, staff helping, listening stations have been provided, all for your benefit, to help you find exactly what you want when you want it. If you can’t find it at the store, go online. It is more than likely that someone somewhere will do their best to sell you almost any musical recording you want. The question is, how did you know where to find it? The other question is, how did you know you wanted it when you did?

There are many interesting ways to answer these questions. I will do so by analyzing the circulation of popular music as conceived by those who claim to be the most important and necessary circulators. There is an obvious absence in this analysis, the absence of the individual consumer, or rather a radical displacement of that consumer. I am analyzing the consumer as invented by the music and entertainment industries, lurking in the marketplace like a demographic cipher, a perpetual and expected presence. While it is clear that some of the more interesting examples of the circulation of recorded music happen in those informal networks that exist outside the formal retail industry, it is important to examine the formal infrastructure next to and within which informal networks exist, in whose contexts they function and against whose interests their participants sometimes act. I am doing so because the formal mainstream “musical economy” (Leyshon, 2005) has a significant amount of power to define the ground for music consumption and not simply because of the fairly straightforward economic facts of retailing. A central part of the entertainment industry’s strategy for survival is to exert a defining influence on the musical economy generally. Even the most intrepid searcher for the most obscure CD will have to fight their way t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Industrial-Strength Strawmen
• Part I All of the In-between
• Part II Bridging the Distance between Production and Consumption
• Part III The Spectacle as Consumption Environment
• Bibliography
• Index