Musical Experience as Transaction

The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. — Herbert Marcuse

This is a book about making money, making music, and using the one to accomplish the other. It is not concerned with formal definitions of music or with practical music making. Nor will it provide specific guidance on how to promote your band, start a record label, or fill out a copyright registration form. This is an exploration of value in its many forms — artistic, social, cultural, and economic — and the capacity of music to create it. It is an examination of the human experience of music, why people place a value on that experience, and — perhaps most critically — how that value is measured.

One way to measure the value of music is by applying "aesthetic" criteria. If we define aesthetic as "being pleasing," then the simplest criterion would be, does a given piece of music please the listener? Since this kind of value is personal and entirely subjective, opinions will vary widely, and comparisons will be difficult. If, on the other hand, we define aesthetic as "a set of ideas or opinions about beauty or art," we have the basis for a system that can support comparisons between works of music and those who create them.

By adopting formal aesthetic measures based on expert-established standards, musical artifacts — songs and larger compositions — can be ranked in terms of quality. The European classical music tradition is an example of this kind of value system. In it, music critics and scholars apply expertise gained from years of critical listening and study to evaluate and compare both established and new musical works and performances.

Outside of the classical tradition, musical quality tends to be measured in other ways, using criteria on the spectrum from high-level expertise to purely personal, in-the-moment reactions. These include various "Top 100" or "Best of" lists, such as Best Love Songs of All Time, Best Summer Anthems of the 2000s, or Best Dance Tracks of 2014, and so on. For lists like these, sometimes the public votes, or the list might be a compilation of a panel of pop music critics' opinions.

Collective judgments like these suggest that one can look at musical value through a social lens rather than a purely aesthetic one. The widespread practice of singing "Happy Birthday," playing Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" for weddings, singing carols at Christmas, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" or "Rock and Roll, Part 2" for sporting events are all markers for musical value as measured by social adoption — popularity. Taken across a large enough sample and over time, this kind of popularity is a measure of the usefulness, familiarity, and "tradition value" of particular pieces of music for specific social events.

Ultimately though, whether value is assessed individually, by breadth of social adoption, by expert authority, in the moment, or over time, "goodness" in music is both situational and difficult to quantify. It is one thing to argue — either in the abstract or for a particular purpose — that Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 is "better" than Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines." But answering the question "how much better?" is much more complicated. Aesthetic and popular assessments only underscore one's personal tastes.

There is, however, one system of measurement — a metric — that can quantify musical value objectively and consistently, and that supports comparative analysis across styles and contexts.

Money.

Purely as a measure of artistic quality or individual appeal, money has obvious limitations. The value and meaning of music is about more than the revenue it generates. It is commonly believed that art and commerce are mutually exclusive, that the people engaged in these aspects of the music enterprise are diametrically opposed, and that the artistic world is divided between creators, who are "good," and exploiters, who are "bad." This polarized view — expressed, for example, by the quote at the beginning of the chapter — powerfully shapes public perception and public policy about music and the arts.

However, virtually no music exists entirely outside an economic context. Even the greatest composers of the European classical music tradition were concerned with compensation; their survival depended upon it. Moreover, the economic constraints of classical music affected not only the lives of the musicians themselves but also the nature of their art. Thus, even though the study of classical music tends to avoid discussing money, a complete assessment of the productivity of iconic composers such as J. S. Bach, Franz Josef Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or Ludwig van Beethoven is not possible without also considering the economic and social conditions in which their music was created.

The increasing professionalization and industrialization of music in the twentieth century amplified the importance of the economic realities that constrain and support the musical arts. In truth, while the value of music cannot be measured only in terms of money, we absolutely cannot talk about the music business or, more broadly, music enterprise, without talking about people who are making money while making music. Ultimately, a failure to understand and function within an economic context undermines the sustainability of any music enterprise, thus diminishing both the artistic and social value that it can create.

As a result, every music enterprise must be assessed in terms of its capacity to create multiple forms of value: good music, social purpose, and a sustainable economic model. Put another way, those metrics become a question: why and how do musicians, audiences, and economic opportunity come together?

MUSIC: SICIOECONOMIC CONTEXT

Musical endeavors can be entirely personal and never intended for public ears, let alone commercial consumption. Yet more often than not, music occurs in a social setting. Most simply, music happens when someone is making it and someone else is listening. In that context, the experience of making and listening to music can be understood as an exchange, or transaction, between performer and listener. It is only when music is placed in such a social context — where the musical experience is an exchange between people — that its full potential to create value can be realized. This is the first core principle of the text.

The places — whether physical or technologically mediated — where musical artists, audiences, and economic opportunity come together are the marketplaces for music. Since musical experiences are as varied and diverse as the many different styles of music, multiplied by the number of performers and listeners, music marketplaces come in many...