Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-9pm4c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T02:33:12.322Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

18 - To the millennium: music as twentieth-century commodity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Andrew Blake
Edited by
Nicholas Cook  and
Anthony Pople
Nicholas Cook
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
Anthony Pople
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
Get access

Summary

In response to the new challenges created by the internet and the converging of communications media, the industry is working very hard on systems of encryption and watermarking and collaborates with the government to set up a strong legal framework and to educate the public about the value of music.

Frances Lowe, Director, British Music Rights, The Performing Rights Society

It is sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is.

Lars Ulrich, drummer of heavy metal band Metallica

There was this bloke and there was me and we really got along. Our friendship was founded on our mutual passions for pop music, indolence and substance abuse. We would sit around together, heroically stoned, and play records all day long: punk records, soul records, horny disco records like ‘Hot Stuff’ by Donna Summer …

Dave Hill, music journalist

Twentieth-century listening and its spaces

Artists, fans, and the music business share an uneasy but symbiotic partnership. Dave Hill’s homosocial friendship, exploring music not through performance but through listening to purchased recordings, is a deeply twentieth-century subjectivity, reflecting the basic premise of much musical entertainment since the invention of sound recording. This involves a set of paradoxical relationships. For one thing, ‘music’ is a phenomenon that can and perhaps should be considered and enjoyed in and for itself – but to facilitate this enjoyment it has become a commodity, bought, sold, and consumed, to the regret of many composers and performers such as Lars Ulrich.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music , pp. 478 - 505
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Attali, Jacques. Noise: A Political Economy of Music (tr. Brian, Massumi), Manchester, 1984.Google Scholar
Barnard, Stephen. On the Radio, Milton Keynes, 1989.Google Scholar
Blake, Andrew. The Land Without Music: Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth Century Britain, Manchester, 1997.Google Scholar
Blake, Andrew. (ed.). Living Through Pop, London, 1999.Google Scholar
Bull, Michael. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life, Oxford, 2000.Google Scholar
Chanan, Michael. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music, London, 1995.Google Scholar
Clarke, Donald (ed.). The Penguin Encyclopaedia of Popular Music, London, 1989.Google Scholar
Culshaw, John. Ring Resounding, London, 1975.Google Scholar
Doctor, Jennifer. The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes, Cambridge, 1999.Google Scholar
Frith, Simon and Andrew, Goodwin (eds.). Sound and Vision: A Rock Video Reader, London, 1993.Google Scholar
Gammond, Peter. The Oxford Companion to Popular Music, Oxford, 1991.Google Scholar
Garbarek, Jan and the Hilliard Ensemble, Officium (ECM, 1993).
Gay, Paul du,Stuart, Hall et al. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, London, 1997.Google Scholar
Glock, William. Notes in Advance, Oxford, 1987.Google Scholar
Gronow, Pekka and Ilpio, Saunio. An International History of the Recording Industry (tr. Christopher, Moseley), London, 1998.Google Scholar
Hill, Dave. ‘Doing What Comes Naturally’, Independent Magazine, 8 April 2000, 30–4.Google Scholar
Hills, Matthew. Fan Cultures, London, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hornby, Nick. High Fidelity, London, 1995.Google Scholar
Kenyon, Nicholas (ed.). Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, Oxford, 1988.Google Scholar
Laing, Dave. ‘Copyright and the International Music Industry’, in Simon, Frith (ed.), Music and Copyright, Edinburgh, 1993.Google Scholar
Lanza, Joseph. Elevator Music, London, 1995.Google Scholar
Lewis, Lisa (ed.). The Adoring Audience, London, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowe, Frances. ‘It’s the Wild Wild Net’, PRS Statement, Spring 2000.Google Scholar
Macan, Edward. Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture, New York, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manuel, Peter. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, Chicago, 1993.Google Scholar
Martin, Brian. Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock, Chicago, 1998.Google Scholar
Monroe, Alexei. ‘Thinking about Mutation: Genres in 1990s Electronica’, in Andrew, Blake (ed.), Living Through Pop, London, 1999.Google Scholar
Nathan, John. Sony: The Private Life, London, 1999.Google Scholar
Reed, Lou. ‘Interview with Vaclav Havel’, in Hanif, Kureishi and Jon, Savage (eds.), The Faber Book of Pop, London, 1995.Google Scholar
Scholes, Percy. The Listener’s Guide to Music: With a Concert-Goer’s Glossary, London, 1919.Google Scholar
Scholes, Percy. The Listener’s History of Music, 3 vols., London, 1923–9.Google Scholar
Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth. On and Off the Record: A Memoir of Walter Legge, London, 1982.Google Scholar
Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man, London, 1986.Google Scholar
Stump, Paul. The Music’s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock, London, 1997.Google Scholar
Taylor, Timothy. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets, London, 1997.Google Scholar
Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures, Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge, 1995.Google Scholar
Toop, David. Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds, London, 1995.Google Scholar
Walker, Mark (ed.). Gramophone Film Music Good CD Guide (3rd edn), Harrow, 1998.Google Scholar
Whiteley, Sheila. The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counterculture, London, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×