Who Owns Culture?: Digital Music and its Discontents By Georgina Ustik (Student #: 11316292) Under the supervision of Niels van Doorn Master’s in Media Studies: New Media and Digital Culture University of Amsterdam, Graduate School of Humanities February, 2018 Abstract This thesis seeks to explore how the internet and emerging technologies affect legal and cultural ownership of music. First, the concepts of legal and cultural ownership, value, and labor will be explored from a Marxist perspective. Next, culture will be defined as a complex way in which individuals connect their identity to community. Culture’s ownership will then be explored from two perspectives — legal ownership as applied via intellectual property, and cultural ownership, as demonstrated with cultural appropriation. These arguments will be set in the context of discriminatory systems and racial inequality, identifying ownership as a problem of access. These arguments will ultimately be applied to music, and how its value and ownership has transformed with the affordances offered by the internet, transformations under informational capitalism, and subsequent acceleration of globalization. This theoretical framework will then be applied to three case studies, each from a different aspect of digital music — the Syrian artist Omar Souleyman, the music blog and label Awesome Tapes from Africa, and the distribution of the Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. These case ​ ​ studies reveal how music ownership, from both a cultural and legal perspective, as set forth in the theoretical framework, are carried out on an individual level. Ultimately, this thesis argues the Internet opened up new modes of music distribution and interaction that do not fit into traditional ideas of ownership. Keywords: Marx, Ownership, Private Property, Informational Capitalism, Culture, Digital Music, Exploitation, Platform Capitalism, Streaming, Globalization 1 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 4 2. What is ownership? 8 2.1 Marx and Ownership 8 2.2 Value in Ownership 9 2.3 The Worker 10 2.4 Race and Marx: A Critique 12 3. Who owns culture? 14 3.1 Culture 14 3.2 The Cultural Industries 15 3.3 Intellectual Property 16 3.4 Property vs. Culture 18 3.5 Copyright is not neutral, and never has been 20 3.6 Cultural Appropriation 22 3.7 Where does music fit into all of this? 25 4. Enter: the internet 26 4.1 Information Capitalism 27 4.2 The New Class System and Knowledge Worker 28 4.3 Digital Culture 31 5. Music 34 5.1 Music as cultural object 35 5.2 The Music Industry, Pre-internet 36 5.2.1 A short history of the music industry 36 5.2.2 The music industry structure, pre-internet 37 5.2.3 The role of the artist 39 5.2.4 Marx and Music 40 5.3 The Music Industry, Post-Internet 42 5.3.1 Fast-changing formats 43 5.3.2 Ownership is threatened 44 5.3.3 Streaming 47 5.3.4 The DIY digital artist 49 2 5.3.5 Music’s cultural ownership 52 6. Methodology 54 7. Case Studies 56 7.1 Omar Souleyman 56 7.2 Awesome Tapes from Africa 62 7.3 Once Upon a Time in Shaolin 68 8. Discussion 74 9. Conclusion 79 Acknowledgements 81 References 82 3 Chapter 1: Introduction Culture and its products have long existed at the point of tension between the public and the private. While linked to identity and co-created through constant interaction, culture produces unique aesthetics and goods that attract people’s desires to participate. However, as existing within capitalist structures, finding ways to control these cultural products has long been a source of tension, further exacerbated by the unequal social dynamics that encourage ownership by the few, and not the collective. Within the last couple of decades, the world has undergone a transformation that has disrupted almost every aspect of daily life. Everything from the way in which people communicate to how business is carried out has taken on a new structure. Capitalism itself transformed, allowing for a new digital economy where data has become a highly valuable resource, and labor has become increasingly precarious. (Fuchs, Castells, Terranova, Gill & Pratt) The world moved online, putting people in closer contact than ever before, accelerating the effects of globalization. Networks between individuals allow for rapid cross-cultural influences, and the emergence of Web 2.0 has allowed for user participation on a whole new scale. (O’Reilly, Carr) Traditionally held notions of value and ownership have been upended, and virtually no industry has gone untouched. Music sits at the forefront of this digital transformation. The music industry has long existed as a model of cultural control, an organized system of contracted labor that keeps artists in exploitative positions. (Greene) Since its origins the industry’s structure has undergone waves of centralization and decentralization. The internet disrupted the music industry possibly more than any other cultural industry. By changing the very format of music, allowing it to move faster and more freely than ever before and leaving it vulnerable to legal and cultural stealth, the internet undermined the value of music, and ownership by extension. (Kasaras, Sterne) As humans grapple with the emergence of new technologies, capitalist restructuring, and struggles over control of identity, the question of who owns music is more complicated than ever. 4 Yet this question is also as important as ever. As society is undergoing a restructuring to keep up with the affordances offered by the internet, ownership over cultural products determines who can derive value from them, as well as who has a voice, and who does not. The internet is ripe with potential for allowing traditional power structures to be disrupted — its affordances allow previously marginalized voices a platform on a scale never seen before. But hegemonic forces are already taking control of digital informational flows in the form of powerful platforms which mediate the ways in which we go about our daily lives, and consume culture. In this context, this thesis will attempt to explore the ways in which music’s ownership is being challenged by the affordances offered by the internet, revolving largely around a theoretical framework as set forth in chapters 2-5. Chapter 2 will begin by looking at what the concept of ownership means through a Marxist lens, presenting the idea that private property is inherently exploitative, and ownership is stealth from the public. This chapter will also explore the meaning of value, commodities, and the exploitative labor-capitalist relations that are bound within both. This chapter will end with a brief critique of Marx through the lens of race theory, and a short exploration into how racism exacerbates already exploitative worker-capitalist relations. (Cox, Reich) Chapter 3 will attempt to address the question: Who owns culture? First, it will look at culture as a complex object, laden with significance and identity politics. (Hall, Williams) Then the cultural industries will be introduced as the systematized way in which people have derived value from cultural products via legal ownership, or intellectual property. (Towse, Adorno & Horkheimer) Then, the ways in which private property and culture come directly into conflict will be explored, as well as how intellectual property has been used as a tool of discrimination. (Greene, McDonald) The ways in which products are culturally owned will be addressing via the topic of cultural appropriation. (Ziff and Rao, Ahmed) Chapter 3 ultimately argues that ownership, from both a legal and cultural sense, is dependent upon access, which determines who can profit off of culture. 5 Chapter 4 is an exploration of the ways in which the internet has transformed how capitalism functions. This chapter introduces the affordances set forth by Web 2.0, as well as how this has led to the emergence of information capitalism, which comes with new potential for exploitative labor practice. This chapter also engages with the rise of platforms, the ways in which the internet transformed labor, and the importance of data to the new economy. (Srnicek) Chapter 5 attempts to address these topics in the context of digital music. First, by introducing music as a cultural object, and then by comparing the music industry pre- and post-internet. This chapter argues that pre-internet, the music industry was a strictly organized network of labors, controlled by labels via contracts. Shifts in centralization and decentralization led to swings in access for marginalized groups, but sets artist-label relations ultimately in the context of Marxist ideas of exploitative labor practice. The post-internet subsection explores how the internet lowers barriers for music production, distribution, and promotion. The introduction of the mp3 allowed for music to move quickly to every corner of the globe, leaving it vulnerable to copyright infringement. (Sterne, Kasaras) Piracy and a shift in attitude towards music consumption threw the music industry into crisis, forcing it to restructure and find value via music streaming platforms, which replaced the music label as the new hegemonic industry forces. As artists are left in a more precarious position than ever, the ways in which they derive value from networks is explored. (Baym) This chapter will end with a discussion of how the internet transformed cultural ownership over music, and allowed it to be easily detached from its context, leaving it more vulnerable than ever to cultural appropriation. This will conclude the literature review. Chapter 6 is the methodology section, which will briefly introduce the three case studies and illuminate why the case study was chosen as the method to illustrate the theories set forth. The case studies will be briefly introduced. Chapter 7 will explore the three case studies — Syrian artist Omar Souleyman, music blog and label Awesome Tapes from Africa, and distribution method of the album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin ​ — via primary and secondary texts such as interviews, profiles, and news reports.