Frontiers of Creative Industries

Exploring Structural and Categorical Dynamics

Candace Jones, Massimo Maoret, Candace Jones, Massimo Maoret

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781787437746
• eBook ISBN: 9781787438385
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Creative industries are a growing and globally important area for both economic vitality and cultural expression of industrialized nations.  The growth and dynamism of creative industries depends on "continuous innovation" that must manage inherent tensions such as novelty to attract consumers and sustain artistic expression and familiarity to aid comprehension and stabilize demand for cultural products.  

In this volume, the macro-structural conditions that shape creative industries – their institutional, categorical and structural dynamics- are examined to provide an overview of new trends and emerging issues in scholarship on this topic.  Creative industries offer products and services that range from the prosaic to the sublime and provide meaning to our lives, and this volume features a wide range of examples, from advertising, to architecture, art markets, Champagne wine, fashion and music.  Contributors examine topics such as the micro-interactions of brokerage relations; how actors transform a brokerage role from control to co-production to enact creative leadership; how investors provide legitimacy to the new categories such as abstract art; how technological disintermediation creates alternative category processes such as authenticity; how social relations shape social evaluation; how prototypical producers can trespass categories and avert negative evaluation; how personal styles enable social evaluation; and how the ambiguity of a category, such as Swing music, facilitated its adaptability and longevity.  The volume concludes with an Afterword examining research on creative industries as a form of cultural product and a category in itself.  

INSTITUTIONALIZING AUTHENTICITY IN THE DIGITIZED WORLD OF MUSIC

Noah Askin and Joeri Mol

ABSTRACT

Since the arrival of mass production, commodification has been plaguing markets – none more so than that for music. By separating production and consumption in space and time, commodification challenges the very conditions underlying economic exchange. This chapter explores authenticity as the institutional response to the commodification of music, rekindling the relationship between isolated market participants in the increasingly digitized world of music. Building upon the “Production of Culture” perspective, we unpack the commodification of music across five different institutional realms – (1) production, (2) consumption, (3) selection, (4) appropriation, and (5) classification – and provide a thoroughly relational account of authenticity as an institutional practice.

Keywords: Music industry; authenticity; commodification; institutional theory; production of culture; digitization

INTRODUCTION

The quest to define and understand authenticity in creative industries – particularly in music – is a well-worn path. Across genres and eras, scholars and practitioners alike have explored the delicate dance between musical production, musicians’ origin stories, consumers’ quest for “realness,” and the forces driving their interaction. From record labels in the 1920s, using pseudonyms to release “illegitimate” or “identity incongruent” recordings (Phillips & Kim, 2008) and country artists carefully crafting stories around their identities (Peterson, 1997), to session players assuming the role of itinerant blues musicians (Grazian, 2005) and radio DJs struggling to demonstrate their credentials in the eyes of the public (Mol & Wijnberg, 2007), producers, consumers, and selectors continuously seek and craft authenticity.

One likely reason why authenticity has manifested itself as one of the most important concerns in the modern music industry is that it has become the linchpin underlying the institutional landscape of the music industry. The commodification of music – rendering music as a good to be exchanged rather than an object of art to be appreciated as a single, one-off experience – became a concern as soon as the first electrical reproduction of music took place (Adorno, 1941). And as this commodification grew as a function of the separation of the sites of production and consumption, authenticity, which helps keep music from becoming a disposable commodity market, grew both in importance and in fragility. Succinctly, the authenticity of music has been in peril ever since the mass reproduction of sound. In order to salvage music as an art form, it became ever more crucial-yet ever more cumbersome-to repair the severed link between the producer and consumer.¹ And the ramifications are clear: if authenticity as an institutional practice failed, the entire music industry would be in jeopardy, dependent as it is on being able to mass produce music in an organizational field where the sites of production and consumption became increasingly dispersed.

As when electrical reproduction first appeared, the recent and ongoing shift to digital production, distribution, and consumption has profoundly changed nearly every aspect of the music business, including (and especially) how authenticity is manifesting itself in this global industry that is expected to approach $50 billion in revenue in 2020 (Bothun, Boyer, Myburgh, & Thomas, 2016). The industry is growing increasingly convoluted as a function of the many dramatic technological and institutional changes that have been taking place over the last two decades: copyright and intellectual property concerns; platform and format competition; fundamental shifts in the meaning and use of genre classifications; data quality and quantity improvements around listeners’ habits and the music itself; and constant real-time connectivity between performers and their fans – with identity and authenticity implications for both sides – represent but a sampling of the issues and opportunities facing the industry and its participants in this new, digital world.

Perhaps the most salient consequence of the digitization of music is that the process of commodification has broken new ground. But rather than reinforcing the hierarchical crystallization of market relations, as was the case during much of the history of recorded music, the supply of and demand for music are now finding each other in entirely novel ways, forming ephemeral rhizomatic networks, often generated by algorithms without any human intervention. Importantly, the conduits for exchange have pried themselves from the grip of the few and have been appropriated by the masses. Ushering in the “long-tail” (Anderson, 2004), a wide array of global music platforms have emerged through which unprecedented numbers of producers and consumers are now connected. This connectivity is both a cause and a consequence of the fragmentation of an industry that was, until digitalization, displaying seemingly unassailable levels of consolidation along with routinized production and consumption. Now more than ever before the production and consumption of music are disembedded from the structural constraints of which they were part. This economic disembeddedness can not only be witnessed in the withering of geographical boundaries – we can stream music in New York City that was produced in Rio de Janeiro mere seconds ago – but also in the waning of economic structures that until recently inhibited migration across the value system of the music industry. Empowered by the digital revolution, musicians can now easily take on economic roles that were traditionally out of their purview and exchange directly with their fan base through a process of disintermediation (Mol, Wijnberg, & Carroll, 2005). While the ramifications are not altogether settled, what is clear is that authenticity has been deeply affected by the introduction digital technology.

In this chapter, we advance the notion that the very manner in which actors are brought into meaningful (or meaningless) relationships in the digitized world of music is chiefly a matter of authenticity succeeding (or failing) as an institutional practice. Our line of argument is as follows. We see the commodification of music as the defining feature of the modern music industry, which we identify as having begun the moment that music could be enjoyed outside the site of creation. This process of commodification in turn required the institutional production of authenticity to provide guideposts about the status of a particular work of music as a legitimate product that could be rendered fit for evaluation, whether on artistic or economic grounds. Thus we view the process of authentication as a thoroughly institutional practice, thereby contributing to a growing body of scholarship on institutional work (Battilana & D’aunno, 2009; Jarzabkowski, Matthiesen, & Van de Ven, 2009; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Lounsbury, 2008; Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010). Our investigation yields a relational account of authenticity because the manner in which institutionalized actors relate to one another lies at the core of how institutional work is practiced. In doing so, accounting for the “frontiers” of the industry prompts us to examine the digitalization of music by investigating not only how music is commodified in novel ways, but also how the very institutional practices that enable commodification have been shaped by the relational pathways underpinning the process of authentication.

COMMODIFYING MUSIC, INSTITUTIONALIZING AUTHENTICITY

The advent of mass production brought the rise of the commodity, and in its wake the exigency of authenticity. At the core of the problem lies the commodification that accompanies mass production, which typically leaves products stripped of marks left by their maker and is the result of the separation of production and consumption in both space and time. When artistic and economic value can no longer be ascertained prima facie, authenticity needs to be produced through institutional practices that bridge the divide between producer and consumer. Authenticity, seen as the rekindling of the relationship between isolated market participants, is therefore in its very essence an institutional achievement, providing guidance about artistic and economic value and keeping music from becoming a disposable good. Without the institutional practice of authentication, the isolated consumers, producers, and other market mediators are bereft of direct cues about value: what is worth consuming, and vice-versa, what is worth producing.

Early accounts depict authenticity as having an especially fraught relationship with technology: technological progress has the potential to increase consumers’ feelings of inauthenticity about artists and their products (cf. Adorno, 1941; Benjamin, 1968 [1935]). For Benjamin (1968 [1935]), the issue of authenticity was always a negative project, chronicling how modern methods of reproduction subtract from the original, yielding a subpar surrogate at best, famously stating that “[e]ven the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (Benjamin, 1968 [1935], p. 214). Adorno was similarly no enthusiast of mechanical reproduction. His principal objection to the mass production of music was his fear that it would generate a homogenous form of low-grade art. He was especially concerned with the notion of the “hitsong,” which was the capstone of the industry’s Tin Pan Alley Era that had captivated US audiences from the turn of the 20th century onwards. His critique not only foreshadows important debates in economic sociology on the effect of industry concentration on the corollary levels of innovation (Lopes, 1992; Negus, 1999; Peterson & Berger, 1975, 1996), but also reiterates institutions doing the thinking for us (cf. Douglas, 1986) when saying, “[s]tandardization of song hits keeps the customers in line doing their thinking for them” (Adorno, 1941, p. 25).

Our investigation, however, is a more positive project. Whereas Adorno and Benjamin were chiefly concerned with the original work of art and lamented the loss of authenticity as it was being mechanically reproduced and readied for mass consumption, our investigation is primarily concerned with how copies of the original either succeed or fail to establish themselves authentically. Thus, rather than critiquing authenticity from a position of what is lacking or lost, we analyze authenticity as the institutional response to commodification in the age of digital reproduction. As such, we see authenticity as a fragile balance that needs to be secured if music as a commodity is to diffuse successfully. What is easily established via co-location (i.e., in a music venue) requires hard work and constant attention the moment separation of production and consumption occurs. In what follows, we show that authenticity is a delicate institutional achievement that comes on foot but that leaves on horseback when jeopardized.

But before exploring the impact of the move to digital, it is necessary to define authenticity. Although many definitions of authenticity exist (for a review see Carroll & Wheaton, 2009), they share the characterization of “being true to” something – be it an object, an individual, an organization, or an experience. That is, not “fake” or “manufactured” (Peterson, 1997, pp. 206–209). This can mean archetypical authenticity, that is, being true to one’s self or background, as in fully and consistently representing one’s origins and experiences (Beverland, 2005; Negro, Hannan, & Rao, 2011). It can also mean stereotypical authenticity, that is, being true to a particular type or style, as in being a “pure” representation of a category or form (Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000; Kovács, Carroll, & Lehman, 2013). And then there is prototypical authenticity, that is, being verified as the original creator of a certain style or product (Fine, 2004). Though prototypical authenticity resembles the other varieties in that it references origins, unlike the other forms of authenticity, prototypicality is used to refer to the progenitor of something, rather than a follower. It is the kind of authenticity reserved for one-of-a-kind things. Of course, the distinct markers for these types of authenticity are often blurred and people and things can span multiple categories. In addition, the concepts can be applied...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Frontiers of Creative Industries: Exploring Structural and Categorical Dynamics
• Brokerage Styles and Interaction Rituals in Creative Projects: Toward an Interactionist Perspective on Brokerage
• Creative Leadership for Social Impact
• Strange Bedfellows: Art and Finance or the Monet-ization of Art
• Why is Style not in Fashion? Using the Concept Of “Style” to Understand the Creative Industries
• The Social Structure of Consecration in Cultural Fields: The Influence of Status and Social Distance in Audience–Candidate Evaluative Processes
• Institutionalizing Authenticity in the Digitized World of Music
• Ambiguity and the Longevity of Creative Industries: The Case of Swing Through the Lens of Interdisciplinary Collaboration
• Not the Usual Suspects: Default Expectations and the Strategic Use of Categories
• Afterword: The Creative Industries — Arts and Materiality Redux
• Index