21st Century Perspectives On Music, Technology, and Culture PDF

21st Century Perspectives
on Music, Technology,
and Culture
Listening Spaces
Edited by
Richard Purcell
and Richard Randall
Pop Music, Culture and Identity

Series Editors: Steve Clark, University of Tokyo, Japan, Tristanne Connolly,
St Jeromes, University of Waterloo, Canada and Jason Whittaker, Falmouth
University, UK
Advisory Board: Chris Best, University College Falmouth, UK, Audrey Faine,
Vice President of Marketing, CBS Records, Gavin Hayes, Musician, USA, John
Hutnyk, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, Allan F. Moore, University
of Surrey, UK, Ryan Moore, Florida Atlantic University. USA, Jennifer Otter,
University of East London, UK, John Phillips, National University of Singapore,
Singapore, Cristina Ruotolo, San Francisco, USA, Karl Simms, University of
Liverpool, UK, Will Straw, McGill University, Canada and Steve Waksman,
Smith College, USA
Pop music lasts. A form all too often assumed to be transient, commercial and
mass-cultural has proven itself durable, tenacious and continually evolving. As
such, it has become a crucial component in defining various forms of identity
(individual and collective) as influenced by factors such as nation, class, gender,
ethnicity, location/situation, and historical period. Pop Music, Culture and Identity
investigates the implications of this greatly enhanced status. Particular attention
will be paid to issues such as the iconography of celebrity, the ever-expanding
archive, the nature of the performance-event, the parameters of generational
memory, and the impact of new technologies on global marketing. In particular,
the series aims to highlight interdisciplinary approaches and incorporate the
informed testimony of the fan alongside a challenging diversity of academic
methodologies.
Titles include:
M. King Adkins
NEW WAVE
Image is Everything
Jennifer Otter Bickerdike
FANDOM, IMAGE AND AUTHENTICITY
Joy Devotion and the Second Lives of Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis
Ewa Mazierska and Georgina Gregory
RELOCATING POPULAR MUSIC
Rosemary Overall
AFFECTIVE INTENSITIES IN EXTREME MUSIC SCENCES
Cases from Australia and Japan
Trajce Cvetkovski
THE POP MUSIC IDOL AND THE SPIRIT OF CHARISMA
Reality Television Talent Shows in the Digital Economy of Hope
Tuulikki Pietil
CONTRACTS, PATRONAGE AND MEDIATION
The Articulation of Global and Local in the South African Recording Industry
Raphal Nowak
CONSUMING MUSIC IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Technologies, Roles and Everyday Life
Michael Urban
NEW ORLEANS RHYTHM AND BLUES AFTER KATRINA
Music, Magic and Myth
Richard Purcell and Richard Randall (editors)
21st CENTURY PERSPECTIVES ON MUSIC, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
Listening Spaces

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Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
21st Century Perspectives
on Music, Technology,
and Culture
Listening Spaces
Edited by
Richard Purcell
Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
and
Richard Randall
Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
21ST CENTURY PERSPECTIVES ON MUSIC, TECHNOLOGY, AND CULTURE: LISTENING SPACES
Selection, Introduction and editorial matter Richard Purcell and
Richard Randall, 2016
Individual chapters Respective authors, 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-49759-8
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Contents
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgements viii
Notes on Contributors ix
Introduction: Listening in on the 21st Century 1

Richard Randall and Richard Purcell
1 The Scream and Other Tales: Listening for Detroit
Radio History with the Vertical File 12
Carleton Gholz
2 On Tape: Cassette Culture in Edinburgh
and Glasgow Now 33
Kieran Curran
3 Radio in Transit: Satellite Technology, Cars,
and the Evolution of Musical Genres 55
Jeffrey Roessner
4 The Internet and the Death of Jazz: Race,
Improvisation, and the Crisis of Community 72
Margret Grebowicz
5 A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic 84
Richard Purcell
6 Love Streams 113
Damon Krukowski
7 A Case for Musical Privacy 120
Richard Randall
8 Digital Music and Public Goods 134
Graham Hubbs
9 The Preservation Paradox 153
Jonathan Sterne
10 Headphones are the New Walls: Music in the Workplace
in the Digital Age 167
Kathy M. Newman
v
vi Contents
11 Researching the Mobile Phone Ringtone: Towards

and Beyond The Ringtone Dialectic 182
Sumanth Gopinath
Index 195
List of Figures
1.1 Mackey, R. (1971) Employee Sit-In Silences

Radio Station for 3 Hours. 12th January.
Used by permission of Detroit Free Press. 14
3.1 SiriusXM Channels by Genre. 60
5.1 Basquiats art gets him a check he cant cash
while Stedings brings despair and little
compensation in Bertogilos Downtown 81 (1981). 94
5.2 The opening shots of Charlie Ahearns Wild Style
establish nostalgia for graffitis past. Later, Zoro
grapples its post-graffiti present. 96
5.3 The credit sequence of Michael Schultzs Krush Groove
are filled with iconic images of Manhattan, like this
shot of the United Nations as well as the postmodern
1 United Nations Plaza. 99
5.4 The assembly line of musical post-production in
Michael Schultzs Krush Groove (1985). 101
5.5 George Tillmans assembly line homage to
Krush Grove ends with a different kind of performance
for the artistic self in Notorious (2009). 104
11.1 Mystery ringtone, spring 2004, Yale University. 184
vii
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Media Initiative of the Center for the Arts
in Society at Carnegie Mellon for their support for this project. The
intellectual and administrative home provided to us by CASs Paul
Eiss, James Duesing, Kathy Newman, and Anna Houck is a model for
interdisciplinary research in the arts and humanities. We are grateful to
Golan Levin, director of Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at
Carnegie Mellon University, for hosting the 2012 Listening Spaces sym-
posium and our 2013 seminar. Since the establishment of this project in
2011, we have been fortunate to work closely with an inspiring group of
scholars and practitioners. Specifically, we are indebted to Larisa Mann,
Trebor Scholz, Graham Hubbs, and Jonathan Sterne, Josh Kun, Carleton
Gholz, Margret Grebowicz, Ian Nagoski, Abby Aresty, Rich Pell, Elaina
Vitale and the students in our Listening Spaces seminar in the fall of
2013. We need to single out the contributions of Gesina Philips. She
was the best research assistant two busy academics could ask for and
was there from the very beginning of our project. Rich Purcell would
also like to thank Steve Secular and Lauren Lancaster-Gudorf for their
research assistance. We would also like to thank Jennifer Howard for
guiding our manuscript to its final form.
viii
Notes on Contributors
Editors
Richard Purcell is Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon

University. His research explores the relationship between race and
subjectification in the 20th and 21st century. He is the author ofRace,
Ralph Ellison and American Cold War Intellectual Culture(Palgrave, 2013)
and co-directs the Listening Spaces Project.
Richard Randall is the Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor of Music

Theory at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Music and holds
a faculty appointment at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.
Randalls research lies at the intersection of music theory, cognitive
psychology, and media and cultural studies. His work employs a wide
range of investigative methods in an attempt to better understand what
music is and why it is important. He directs the Music Cognition Lab
and co-directs the Listening Spaces Project. Randall is the co-founder of
the Pittonkatonk May-Day Music Festival and Workshop, which seeks
to transcend traditional political economies of musician and audience
and create socially engaged and sustainable musical events supported
by vested community collaborators.
Contributors
Kieran Curran recently completed his PhD on The Cynic in Post

WWII British Popular Culture (Music and Literature) at the University
of Edinburgh. He currently works as a tutor in English Literature at
Edinburgh, and is a part-time music maker/promoter.
Carleton Gholz is Lecturer in Communication Studies at Oakland

University in Rochester, Michigan, president of the Friends of the
E. Azalia Hackley Collection at the Detroit Public Library, and the
founder of Detroit Sound Conservancy. He can be reached via his per-
sonal website: http://csgholz.org
Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at

the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Ringtone
Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form (2013), and he co-edited with
Jason Stanyek, The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies (2014).
ix
x Notes on Contributors
His writings on Steve Reich, musical minimalism, Marxism and music

scholarship, the Nike+ Sport Kit, the ringtone industry, Bob Dylan,
and Benjamin Britten have appeared in various scholarly journals and
edited collections.
Margret Grebowicz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Goucher

College. She is the author of Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna
Haraway (with Helen Merrick; 2013), Why Internet Porn Matters (2013),
and editor of several collections, including Gender after Lyotard (2007).
She has written extensively in the area of contemporary European
philosophy, science and technology, and gender.
Graham Hubbs is an Assistant Professor in the University of Idahos

Department of Philosophy. His central area of research is moral psy-
chology, but he also studies the connection between conceptions of
property and justice in political philosophy. He has worked in Italy as a
Visiting Fulbright Scholar at theUniversit di Genovaand as a Visiting
Scholar at the LiberaUniversit degli Studi Sociali.
Damon Krukowski studied at Harvard University. He was the drummer

for the influential indie band Galaxie 500 and currently performs with
pop/rock duo Damon and Naomi. Krukowski has written numerous
articles for Artforum, Bookforum, The Wire, and Pitchfork on the digital
music industry and its contentious relationship with the artists that
produce content used by streaming services.
Kathy M. Newman is Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon

University. Her primary interest is in the relationship between mass
culture and the masses the dialectical relationship between our
institutions of television, film, radio, and the internet and our social/
political formations (Raymond Williams). Her book on these ques-
tions, Radio-Active: Advertising and Activism 19351947, was published
in 2004. She is also a regular blogger forThe Center for Working Class
Studies.
Jeffrey Roessner is Dean of the Arts and Humanities at Mercyhurst

University, where he teaches classes in contemporary literature and
leads workshops in creative writing. His primary research interests
include historical fiction and cultural studies, and he has published
essays on Peter Ackroyd, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and the
Beatles. His recent work includes articles on rock mockumentaries,
the post-confessional lyricism of R.E.M., and protest music in the
wake of 9/11.
Notes on Contributors xi
Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and

Communication Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science
Program at McGill University. He is author of The Audible Past: Cultural
Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003) and MP3: The Meaning of a Format
(2012), and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics
of culture. Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.
Introduction: Listening
in on the 21st Century
Richard Randall and Richard Purcell
This anthology is the result of a scholarly collaboration we started in

2011. Thanks to the generosity of the Center for the Arts in Society
and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon
University we were able create Listening Spaces, an interdisciplinary
project to examine the variety of ways people listen to, consume, and
produce music in an increasingly digitized world. It was an attempt to
combine the methodological and analytical approaches of music theory,
musicology, and psychology with the historical materialism of cultural
studies. We also conceptualized our project as a way of bridging a
practitioners emphasis on musical performance with a humanities and
social science focus on the objects, cultures and politics human beings
create out of music-making. Our approach is not entirely new. This set
of concerns is broadly understood as the province of ethnomusicol-
ogy, which attends to the above set of interlocking concerns with an
anthropological thrust. Since the early 1990s these concerns have also
been addressed within the field of sound studies, which, as Jonathan
Sterne writes takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival
(Sterne 2011, p. 2). While music is not the central focus of sound
studies, we were drawn to it precisely because it represented a way to
conceptualize the study of music in a way that truly embraced many
mediating formats and scholarly disciplines.
Making music the center of our project did expose us to some meth-
odological and analytical challenges. The most significant was our
attempt to approach music without translating the classical music
ideology into the very materialist domain of musical inquiry we set out
to explore (Taylor 2007, pp. 46). The study of popular music within
cultural studies can fall into such traps and reify the political and mar-
ket derived ideology behind the ideas of genius and masterpiece
1
2 Richard Randall and Richard Purcell
(Taylor 2007, p. 4). We also acknowledge that with the rise of the
Californian ideology we have increasingly fetishized the devices,
software platforms, and other disruptive technological innovations
that are increasingly associated with music delivery (Barbrook and
Cameron 1995). In other words, given the unprecedented availability
of file formats, storage capabilities, mobile devices, and web-based
platforms geared towards music playback and production, it would be
easy to focus our inquiry on the objects geared towards delivering music.
At first glance, such an object-oriented approach makes sense because our
interactions with media are often the most recognizable kind of sonic
engagements. It is easy to conflate musics elusive objectness with the
reifications required for production, distribution, storage, commodifica-
tion, and performance. Similarly, it is also tempting and perhaps disci-
plinarily convenient to reduce music and the associated experiences to
sound and psychoacoustics. The Listening Spaces project revealed to us
that even in our increasingly digital world, music remains not a thing,
but a lattice of affordances, experiences, and actions that are specific to
music. We began to focus on listening as a choice that is either made
by us or for us for reasons that span from transgressive empowerment
to hegemonic oppression. Scholars such as Jacques Attali, Peter Szendy,
and Susan McClary have discussed that to listen to music is to make
real the promises and qualities it embodies. This project wove together
threads from a variety of disciplines and the resulting fabric revealed that
musical listening spaces are everywhere and each comprises a complex
of cultural, psychological, political, and economic meaning.
In order to approach these listening spaces we first needed to under-
stand who or what is listening as well as how and why they are listen-
ing. Listening is not an idle activity. We are saddled with responsibilities
and rights, as Szendy tells us, as listeners (Szendy 2008, p. 4). Listening
expresses as well as creates subjectivity. It also suggests or at least neces-
sitates a certain level of active attention, especially when it comes to
music. There is of course the furniture music of Satie or the smooth
arrangements that play to you while you shop. Style, composition and
intent aside, these background musics demand a listener to listen, but
at a different threshold of engagement. Yet they all are intended, to
borrow a phrase, as forms of accompaniment to activities that for all
intents and purposes we think about outside of the musical realm. But
what is music? We do not ask this as an empty rhetorical provocation.
Rather, taking seriously the activity of listening as accompaniment
requires that we become part of an ensemble with our bodies as literal
and figurative accompanying instruments.
Here, we looked to Christopher Smalls term musicking as a guide

to understanding the potentially infinite array of activities that define
musical engagement (Small 1998). Central to Smalls argument is that
we should move away from fetishizing the musical object, whether that
be the CD or the musical score, and instead appreciate the rich variety
of human musical activity, such as tapping on a table, listening to a
portable music player and singing lullabies to soothe a child to sleep.
Digital technology has come to mediate many of our intensely personal
and communal accompaniments with music. Many have gone from the
labor intensive, analog, tactile and at times intensely emotional experi-
ence of making a mixtape to dragging and dropping files onto playlists.
File-sharing has replaced handing over a piece of vinyl or even burn-
ing a CD. Impersonal machines and equations are doing what friends,
acquaintances, DJs and record-store owners once did: recommending
music for us to listen to and enjoy. When Small wrote Musicking: The
Meanings of Performing and Listening (1998) he could not have foreseen
the fundamental shift of musics digital medium from binary codes on
a compact disk to discreet file formats on hard drives and servers. There
is, of course, a very long history of physical formats and copyright to
look back on as a guide to our own digitized age. Yet we also believe that
the digital age has presented a set of new activities and questions as to
what musicking embodied as listening means.
We are reminded of Kate Crawfords call to consider the ways we pay
attention online as practices of listening (Crawford 2009, p. 525).
Of course, when we use music online, whether through the variety of
commercially available streaming services, production tools, or the files
on our physical drives, we are obviously engaged in such a practice. Yet
unlike a piece of sheet music, vinyl LP or cassette tape, these new musi-
cal objects are actively listening to us, too. Some of this functionality
is built into the networked devices and platforms we use. Dedicated
services like Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Music and many others are
designed to make sharing playlists, individual tracks and DJ sets easier.
These functions are also built into social media platforms that are
not dedicated to music sharing like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and
Vine, which make embedding music into web pages or feeds a simple
affair. The corporations that design these proprietary services are also
listening in through the metadata generated through our musicking
activities. And as Edward Snowden has also revealed to us, so is the U.S.
government.
By now we also know that the information we both push and pull
through our mobile devices and into the Internet also creates a kind of
musical subjectivity; one that is an aggregate of all of our musicking and

listening metadata. In turn, algorithms summon this musical doppel-
ganger in the form of banner ads, promoted tweets, and recommenda-
tions for purchases, Facebook friends, and YouTube videos all of which
demands our musical attention even when (or if) we log off or sleep
(Crary 2013). This is all to say that as we sought to think with the musi-
cally inclined subject positions Szendy and Small offer listener and
musicker we knew that both have to jostle for ontological position
with the user; who at least in terms of the commercial Web, is beholden
to legally binding contracts and terms of service (not unlike those we
implicitly agree to when we purchased vinyl records, cassette tapes or
compact disks in the past) that clashes with the rights of the listener.
The mediation of music, of course, is one of the hallmarks of its
absorption into a capitalist economy. Invoking Debords idea of the
spectacle, we see how mediation steers and controls choice. Debord
writes the bureaucratic economy cannot leave the exploited masses
any significant margin of choice, since any other external choice
whether it concern food or music, is already a choice to destroy the
bureaucracy completely (Debord 1983, section 64). When listeners are
empowered to choose freely, they are simultaneously empowered to
operate outside of bureaucratic systems that seek to control and exploit
them. In the case of digital technology, listening often has the appear-
ance of increased choice and empowerment, but at the cost of increased
mediation. The spectacle of digital technology lulls listeners into believ-
ing, for example, that Apples iTunes store represents an expansion of
choices about where to purchase music only to later learn that Apple
was systematically deleting non-iTunes-purchased music off of listen-
ers iPods every time it was connected to the service (Elder 2014). The
21st-century perspectives of listening we are trying to capture in this
anthology are twofold. On one hand, we seek to better understand how
the increasing digital mediation of our musical experiences conflicts
with and complements our earlier ways of listening. On the other hand,
we want to know how our current epistemological position can help us
interpret and understand our past practices.
There is no one right way to investigate the significance of listening
in the 21st century. This anthology reflects this by seeking a diver-
sity of voices and methods that find meaningful listening spaces in
places we might not expect or have long forgotten about. 21st Century
Perspectives on Music, Technology, and Culture is a volume of critical
essays concerned with subjects at the confluence of music consump-
tion, burgeoning technology, and contemporary culture. Essays within
the collection frame that point of intersection by focusing variously

on issues of musical communities and the politics of media; taken as
a whole, these essays present a contemporary evaluation of the diverse
and changing structures of music delivery and affordance. While sound
reproduction and music making has relied on digital technology since
the early 20th century, the role of digital technology in how we become
acquainted with and listen to commercial music is a fairly recent phe-
nomenon. Our anthology is a response to the increasing dominance
digital technology and other delivery platforms have had on how we
buy and listen to music in the 21st century. We believe that the so-
called digital turn has also changed the nature of what we understand
music to be.
Our anthology is an attempt to raise specific critiques of current
music practices as well as make more explicit the implicit historical
materialist critique at the heart of musicking. One way to see technolo-
gies such as social networks, streaming-music services, recommendation
algorithms, virtual cloud storage, and portable listening devices is as
an increased democratization of where and how we can have musical
experiences. While these technologies make music possible everywhere,
they have also changed the nature of how music and musical activities
are commodified as well as their social meaning. This raises important
ethical, socio-political, and philosophical questions. For instance, how
do we define musical performance and labor in an age where so much
music and musical taste is freely shared online? What is the value of
music, musical performance, and creation in such a context? What is
the fate of certain musical genres (Jazz, Classical, R&B, Hardcore, and
Punk for instance) when their respective audiences have become amor-
phous (in the case of R&B) or seem to be disappearing (Classical and
Jazz) in an increasingly digital era? Does radio mean the same thing
when streaming music services like Spotify, YouTube, and Beats Music
give users more choice and control of what, where, and how they listen?
Do things like sound fidelity and detail mean much to listeners given
the dominance of compressed file formats like the MP3? How has cor-
porate media consolidation changed the relationship between music
and other media forms such as cinema and literature? Has the shift away
from musical formats like the cassette tape, the transistor radio and the
vinyl record fundamentally changed how we think of music? Does the
trend towards streaming and cloud-based music delivery services raise pri-
vacy issues for consumers yet unforeseen in the history of music? We have
collected essays engaging with these questions and others that the digital
turn in music has challenged us to answer. Some of them also address
how past musical practices can provide a guide for the present. Through
these essays we hope to construct a discussion of universal themes of
modern music practices.
Carleton Gholzs The Scream and Other Tales: Listening for Detroit
Radio History with the Vertical File is one of two essays in this anthol-
ogy addressing the relationship between radio and our 21st-century
listening practices. Using Susan Douglas canonical Listening In as a
starting point, Gholzs contribution uses archival research and oral his-
tory to give us a sense of the way terrestrial radio stations have shaped
the cultural and political imagination of the residents of Detroit,
Michigan from 1941 to the present. For Gholz, the archive containing
the history of Detroit radio is not only a resource but is itself an object
of analysis. For a city so vital to American and world music, Gholz
wonders why the historical record of its most important radio stations
are either absent or, in the case of urban contemporary radio station
WJLB, which recently located from downtown Detroit to the suburbs of
Farmington Hills, contained in one manila file folder of photocopied
promotional materials going back only a few years. WJBL, which was
purchased and relocated by its parent company Clear Channel, creates
an occasion for Gholz to reflect on the longer history of Detroit radio
and its meaning for critics of media and culture. In the aftermath of the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, with the rise of non-terrestrial radio
and Internet-based streaming services, Gholz contemplates what kind
of listening space radio is now. While stalwart station WJLB still features
live DJ late-night mixes, the rash of corporate consolidations in the
wake of the Telecommunications Act has atrophied Detroit terrestrial
radio options.
Kieran Currans essay, On Tape: Cassette Culture in Edinburgh and
Glasgow Now, provides an ethnography undertaken in the two largest
cities in Scotland (Edinburgh and Glasgow) both of which have vibrant
independent music scenes. He presents interviews with a local pro-
moter, a band, an independent label and a fan in each city, the subject
being the seeming resurrection of cassette-tape culture in the digital era.
The questions Curran seeks to answer are: Why is this happening? What
issues arise out of the artifact of the tape itself? What is the appeal of
such an oft-derided format, especially in the context of the proliferation
of digital music? Are there unique sonic qualities that are preferable?
Is the physical form of the tape somehow more authentic feeling
than a digital download? He arrives at intriguing insights into the role
of the cassette tape in contemporary Scottish music-making, as well
as connecs with broader moves, internationally back to analog modes
of production and distribution albeit a move that is accompanied by

the parallel realization that digital reproduction and distribution must
also be incorporated.
In Radio in Transit: Satellite Technology, Cars and the Evolution of
Musical Genres Jeffrey Roessner takes up the radical transformation of
radio in the aftermath of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. While
the stirrings of satellite radio technology date back to the early 1980s, it
was not until after a vigorous lobbying campaign that, in 1997, the FCC
created two satellite digital audio radio licenses to XM Satellite Radio
and Sirius. Despite its relatively modest market share, Roessner argues
that since its inception music stations on satellite radio have marketed
and structured themselves as a simulacra of the counter-cultural free-
dom associated with 1960s car radio programming and culture. He
writes that satellite stations achieve this by offering rock icons as live
DJs as well as radically challenging traditional musical genres [until]
the notion of genre itself disintegrates through the proliferation of
numerous micro-genres. The effect of this breakdown in genre is to
give the very illusion of capriciousness and discovery that terrestrial
radio offered. Roessner, like Gholz, ends his contribution wondering
what the future holds for satellite radio in an age of Internet-based
music streaming services that offer a more privatized and tailored
listening experience.
In The Internet and the Death of Jazz: Race, Improvisation, and
the Crisis of Community, Margret Grebowicz explores the effects of
social networking on the jazz scene and how identities of what jazz is
become inconsistent and uneven, in spite of the meta-level narratives
at work in Kickstarter and other initiatives that depend on the logic of
a unified, univocal social body. Mediated by these social technologies,
She proposes, the jazz scene constitutes an inoperative community
in Jean-Luc Nancys sense of the words, in which the with-ness
of being-with-others forecloses the thing that the community is.
In other words, in the era of social technologies there is no jazz com-
munity understood as a thing with particular, describable attributes,
but the we of jazz consists of social actors being with/against each
other in politically productive ways. She draws on Jean-Luc Nancys The
Inoperative Community and Jacques Derridas work on hospitality and
democracy to support this thesis.
Like many of the books contributors, Richard Purcells A Brief
Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic examines the interaction between
music and labor in the 21st century. Cinema, primarily through the
genre of the musical and biopic has created elaborate fantasies that
present music and its related activities as un-alienated labor. Despite

the crisis in valuation peer-to-peer and music streaming services have
exposed in the late 20th and 21st century, films about musicians and
music continue to perpetuate these myths. Purcells essay argues that
hip-hop biopics are a valuable resource in tracing the complicated
relationship hip-hop culture and the arts within neoliberalism has
with creative labor. Most of his essay focuses on the first cycle of fic-
tional films explicitly about hip-hop culture; with particular attention
paid to Edo Bertoglios Downtown 81 (1981), Charlie Ahearns Wild Style
(1982) and Michael Schultzs Krush Groove (1985). These films, more than
any others of this early cycle, represent the shifting values that collectives
and creative labor have within hip-hop culture once the priorities of
high concept cinema transform cinema into more of a listening space.
Damon Krukowski has been involved as a musician in the industry
for over 25 years. In this time, he has seen unprecedented transforma-
tions in how musicians are able to both make music and make money
with their music. His essay, Love Streams, details his personal experi-
ences coming to terms with the new music industry giants of Pandora
and Spotify as a member of the band, Galaxy 500 While their music is
played frequently on these services, they get almost no royalty money in
exchange. He goes on to write that these services are not record compa-
nies and do not actually do anything to support the creation or distribu-
tion of new music. Ironically, companies like Pandora and Spotify are
not in the music business. Rather, he argues, they exist to attract specu-
lative capital. The conclusion is that musicians cannot look towards
these new distribution powerhouses for any kind of meaningful support.
Richard Randalls A Case for Musical Privacy positions streaming
music services as an unprecedented kind of listening space that has
serious social and political economic ramifications. His work decodes
the importance of music in our lives and how we use music to con-
struct, support, and revise personal and social identities. He locates
what Fuchs and others call prosumption in Web 2.0 technologies in
general and streaming music services in particular. The connection
between prosumption and surveillance has been widely discussed in
recent years and Randall argues that listening is not passive but active,
and that the choices we make in listening have the capacity to reveal
important and private personal information. Our naive attitudes about
musical listening and musical identities are due, Randall argues, to our
misplaced belief that listening is material engagement. Instead, he asks
us to appreciate that music is not a thing, but a fundamental and critical
human activity. By focusing on the experience of the listener, Randalls
essay complements Krukowskis essay to create a broader critique of

streaming music services.
Graham Hubbs Digital Music and Public Goods tackles the central
concerns at the heart of music and music listening in the 21st century:
from where and how do we acquire our music. Approaching these
concerns from the disciplines of ethics and political philosophy, Hubbs
argues that the discourse of piracy that we have traditionally used to
describe informal and more organized peer-to-peer networks is anti-
quated with the ubiquity of digital file formats. This transformation of
the musical object into a spaceless object has forced us to reconsider
older concepts of copyright and property rights. Hubbs suggests that
this has led to a partial decommodification of the music object and
that our various attitudes concerning the legal status of digital music
comes from the fact that digital music lacks the hallmark features of
private property. Hubbs mediation on music format, storage, and prop-
erty law leads him to declare that music is in fact a public good, which
explains why the institutions and ideologies of private property are so
poorly equipped to deal with human music making.
Jonathan Sternes essay The Preservation Paradox juxtaposes the
power of digital storage and encoding of sound media against its fragil-
ity. While digital technology allows for unprecedented ease in the stor-
age and collection of sound files, this power, he argues, is an illusion.
At issue is the all or nothing identity of digital files. While a damaged
vinyl record may play with some scratches and pops, the corrupted data
file will not. Digital data, he says, have a more radical threshold of
intelligibility. One moment they are intelligible, but once their decay
becomes palpable, the file is rendered entirely unreadable. In other
words, digital files do not age with any grace. Where analog recordings
fade slowly into nothingness, Sterne writes, digital recordings fall off
a cliff from presence into absence.
Kathy Newman begins Headphones Are the New Walls: Music in
the Workplace in the Digital Age by asking us What kind of lis-
tening space is an office space? If you happen to work in an open
plan workspace the likely answer is an incredibly noisy one. With
the rise of the New Economy and what Andrew Ross has termed no
collar work, there has been a rapid adoption of more efficient and
humane-seeming workplace design. As Newman reminds us, sound
is the unruly, anarchic component in the open office plan and her
essay explores the multiplicity of ways corporations and workers
attempt to strategically manage the office soundscape. Her analysis
of over a decade of sociological and organizational behavior research
and mainstream journalistic press accounts of the effects of music at

work reveals that behind these strategies lies a similar desire to make
the workplace more humane in order to extract even more surplus
labor. The sonic self-care workers perform with digital audio players and
high-end noise cancelling headphones is just as problematic as the deci-
sions made by management to pipe in Justin Bieber to increase typing
efficiency. Ultimately, Newman wonders if the battle over the corporate
office airwaves and the kinds of power and autonomy held by work-
ers across the board is a potential opening for a shift in their class
consciousness.
Sumanth Gopinath has the unique distinction of being a ring-tone
scholar having studied the phenomena for a number of years and writ-
ten the book, The Ringtone Dialectic. Gopinaths essay Researching the
Mobile Phone Ringtone: Towards and Beyond The Ringtone Dialectic,
reflects on this program of research and the fading away of what was
once a $3 billion industry. He details the technological history of the
ringtone-as-listening space and its political economy. The ringtone
is responsible, he claims, for creating what we now call the mobile
entertainment industry. An optimistic convergence between mobile
technologists and the music industry brought claims of a new era of
mobile music. The ringtone became so ubiquitous in the mid-2000
that composers started to incorporate these sounds into their concert
music. These sounds, such as the Nokia Tune or the iPhone Marimba,
became part of our everyday experience. His essay details the remark-
able decline of this once dominant industry with critical reference to
its cultural, political, and economic ramifications.
Our contributors represent a wide variety of intellectual and practical
engagements with music. Each essay offers a unique voice that we hope
will connect with each contributors community and draw them into
our discussion. We hope not only to critique past and current practices,
but to also demonstrate that these issues are not the domain of any one
particular group of intellectuals or practitioners.
References
Barbrook, R. and Cameron, A. (1995). The Californian Ideology. Science as Culture
6.1, 4472.
Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. New York: Verso
Books.
Crawford, K. (2009). Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23(4), 52535.
Debord, G. (1983). The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red.
Elder, J. (2014). Apple Deleted Rivals Songs from Users iPods. Online,
3 December. Available from: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/12/03/apple-
deleted-rivals-songs-from-users-ipods/ (accessed 31 May 2015).
Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover:
University Press of New England.
Sterne, J. (Ed.) (2011). The Sound Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.
Szendy, P. (2008). Listening, A History of our Ears. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Taylor, T. D. (2007). Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
1
The Scream and Other Tales:
Listening for Detroit Radio History
with the Vertical File
Carleton Gholz
We sway the minds of our community and if we cant

stand up for a principle, we dont need to be on the air.
Martha Jean the Queen (Brown, 1970)
While [sic] all the daily tales of defaulting cities, pro-

posed increases in income taxes for city residents, cuts
in services and threatened layoffs, a little non-static
music really clears the clutter from the brain, thus per-
mitting fresh perspectives to enter. Music can be much
more than a part of the dcor in an airport waiting
room and its values go beyond its use as a substitute
for novocain [sic] at the dentists office.
Ken Cockrel (Cockrel, 1975)
They say radio is war. It may be a physical war, but

its not a mental war. What gets played here shouldnt
be judged by whats happening in New York or Los
Angeles, [Mojo] says. They should take a look at whats
happening here in Detroit, at unemployment. They
should count the raggedy cars and the people walking
around at 3 a.m. with nowhere to go.
Electrifying Mojo (Borey, 1982)
In the E. Azalia Hackley Collections Detroit Radio subject file at the

Detroit Public Library, a handful of newspaper clippings describe a radio
strike held on then AM radio station WJLB. The Detroit Free Press, Detroit
News, and Michigan Chronicle picked up the story. The first week-long
walkout ended just before Christmas 1970 after then black program
12
The Scream and Other Tales 13
director Al Perkins had been fired (Wittenberg, 1970). Detroit News

writer Brogan quoted disc jockey Martha Jean as saying, Ive been
in radio 15 years and Im still not able to be an individual. Its
pathetic to have [to] take a black or white side but were fighting for
everybody in this radio industry. Black disc jockeys are insecure because
we have so few places to work (1970a). Strikers asked for support from
the AFL-CIO (Wittenberg, 1970) in addition to existing representation by
the National Association of Television and Radio Announcers (NATRA)
(Brown, 1970). At one point the strikers, who were also supported by
the NAACP, moved their picket to WJLBs Booth Broadcasting owner
John L. Booths home in the East Side Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe
Farms (Detroit News, 1970a). Though a Wayne County Judge declared
the picketing illegal (Brogan, 1970b), sympathizers eventually joined
strikers outside the stations downtown studios in the Broderick Tower
with signs that read Black management for a black community and
We dont need a plantation station! (Michigan Chronicle, 1970b). The
strikers initially won the strike, with Perkins reinstated and Norman
Miller hired as the first black general manager (Detroit News, 1970b). But
by January, black staff understood that promises had not been kept and
Miller was General Manager in name only.
Thats when the Queen screamed.
A Free Press writer wrote, Startled listeners heard Martha Jean Steinberg,
a popular personality who conducts a program of music and phone con-
versation under the name of Martha Jean the Queen, gave [sic] a little
scream, and then all was silence (Mackey, 1971). Another Free Press
reporter elaborated: The scream brought a deluge of telephone calls
to Detroit police from concerned listeners who feared she [the Queen]
had been hurt (Wendlend, 1971). Steinberg and several others locked
themselves into the on-air studios and held a sit-down strike. Another
clipping in the file, from the Detroit Free Press, shows a photo, taken by
Free Press photographer Dick Tripp, of Al Perkins reading a handwritten
note from behind the studio glass, the door blockaded with chairs (see
Figure 1.1).
Memory of this strike, as well as evidence that it ever happened, is
largely gone except within the dusty, yellowed, aging vertical file in an
archive established in 1943 and dedicated to blacks in the performing
arts. The legacy of the strike whats at stake in remembering it today
is at the heart of this chapter. Here I make two related arguments. The
first follows radio scholar Newmans (2000) position that post-war black
radio stations (in her research, Memphis station WDIA) provided a new
space for entertainment, information, music, citizenship and goodwill,
14
Figure 1.1 Mackey, R. (1971) Employee Sit-In Silences Radio Station for 3 Hours. 12th January. Used by permission of Detroit
Free Press
and, led to the increased participation of Memphis African Americans

in the mainstream of commercial life of the region (pp. 76 and 236).
Drawing from the Hackley vertical file, I will provide evidence that
WJLB participated in creating a similar place for black Detroiters enter-
tainment, news, and, at times, protest, for over 70 years. At the same
time, I extend Newmans argument by diachronically following the ver-
tical file beyond the immediate post-war period into the 21st century.
The goal here is to, for the first time, set down an archival spine for
an integral history of Detroit black radio history. WJLB, its managers,
and on-air talent continue to struggle, as the Queen and her cohort
did forty plus years ago, over what exactly constitutes radio as a space
of listening not only in Detroit but, through corporate ownership and
online-streaming, nationally and internationally. This chapter then pre-
sents a provisional narrative that I hope will encourage future research,
including my own, on exactly what is at stake in recovering the cultural
laboring of radio in a city like Detroit.
Aural History
Why is this narrative of the classical network era to the convergence

era so ephemeral in Motown, the capital of 20th-century music? The
status of the Hackley Collection (HC) within a 150-year-old, under-
funded library, and the lack of archives within the station itself, go to
the heart of how we listen to our past and present. In recent years, the
City of Detroits economic struggles, including its cultural expressions,
have become focal points for discussing the health of the American
Dream. However, this discussion has rarely strayed from the use of
hackneyed factory metaphors, worn out success-and-failure stories,
and an ever-narrowing cast of characters. The result is that the com-
mon sense understanding of Detroits musical and cultural legacy
tends to end in 1972 with the departure of Motown Records to Los
Angeles, if not even earlier in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1967.
In my larger research (2011), as well as my activism as Founder and
Executive Director of the Detroit Sound Conservancy, I provide an oral
history of Detroits post-Motown aural history and in the process make
available a new urban imaginary for judging the citys well-being. To
do this I utilize archival research and interviews in order to recover
the life stories of a group of Detroiters in their struggle to change
and be changed by Detroits soundscape during the post-Motown era.
A diachronic study, my work starts by revisiting Detroits role in the
modern soundscape from musicians, dancers, promoters, and critics
16 Carleton Gholz
who experienced the citys numerous ballrooms and clubs, listened

to its charismatic radio DJs, and produced its studio-driven sound.
However, I also pay special attention to the emergence of a new sound-
scape in the 1970s with a new set of heroes club DJs and an audience
that both reflected and resisted the racial, sexual, and class hierarchies
of the time. Detroiters experienced the impact of this subterranean
population in the ensuing years as the genres of disco, hip-hop, house,
and techno emerged and the citys residents mixed together as they had
rarely done before or since. This chapter then is one piece of this larger
argument.
Arnold (2008) argues that the 1996 Telecommunications Act has not
increased diversity in ownership or encouraged localism, local pro-
gramming in the Public Interest. He then argues that stations and the
Federal Communications Commission need to maintain better records so
that communication researchers can hold them accountable to local-
ism, what Arnold summarizes as local community standards (p. 8).
This is just one consequence of Detroits sonic aporias. The other, broader
consequence, is the one already foregrounded by Barlow in Voice Over,
his 1999 ground-breaking primary-source work on black radio. Barlow
contends that:
Especially since the late 1940s, when it emerged as African Americans

most ubiquitous means of mass communication surpassing the
black press black radio has been a major force in constructing
and sustaining an African American public sphere. It has been the
coming-together site for issues and concerns of black culture: lan-
guage, music, politics, fashion, gossip, race relations, personality,
and community are all part of that mix. Moreover, black radio has
been omnipresent on both sides of the color line, part of the shared
public memory that dates back to the 1920s and has deep roots in
the broader popular culture. (p. xi)
Despite Barlows confident claims, cultural spaces like radio continue to

be relegated to the background by those who claim, like Martelle (2012)
and Thompson (2001), to want to know what has gone wrong in Detroit
and what might happen to change it. By grounding my work in the
worlds oldest still extant, but largely undatabased, black performance
archive, as well as a selection from its 275,000 vertical file items (Minor,
2015), I supplement those political-economic findings by dislodging
Detroit radio history from the nostalgia genre where it currently resides
(Carson, 2000).
Listening in Detroit
For Douglas (1999), radio splits open the struggles over 20th-century media
consumption and production, throwing early media scholars preoccu-
pation with television into relief and allowing her readers to focus on
how radio interacted so significantly with the American imagination
(p. 20). Douglass history of that imaginative dialectic between radio
technology and its audiences maps well against Detroits regional radio
history. Conot (1974), for instance, points out that in the 1920s Detroit
had one of the first radio stations, WWJ (p. 226), while a college media
text by Hilmes (2014) remembers how populist demagogues like Father
Coughlin from the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak made national news
and directly impacted the way political voices made their way onto
the airwaves in the 1930s (pp. 1415). And starting in the 1940s and
taking off in the 1950s, black DJs became strong personalities on the
air and streets of Detroit, including Martha Jean, whose early career is
mentioned by Douglas (1999). In the 1960s and 1970s, Carson (2006)
reminds his readers that Detroit stations like WABX were on the cutting
edge of FM free form radio. But Detroit also has some unique features.
Detroits radio frequencies share a border with Canada, reminding us
that the emergence of radio in the United States is a transnational and
global story. My own parents, who grew up north and east of Detroit in
the border city of Port Huron, remember hearing Motown Records in the
1960s not from black DJs in Detroit, but white DJs in Canada broadcasting
from the Big 8 studios of CKLW (McNamara, 2004).
Perhaps most importantly, Detroit radio has a significant relationship
to black history and performance. As Barlow (1999) points out, Detroiter
Joe Louiss rematch victory over Max Schmeling in 1938 caused instant
jubilation across the country when it was carried on radio nation-
ally from New York City (pp. 4950). But even without the help of the
Brown Bomber, the Detroit area had one of the first black-owned radio
stations, as Cintron (1982) describes, in WCHB in nearby Inkster and, as
documented by Smith (1999), a robust, politically motivated black civic
and cultural movement that produced, amongst other things, Motown
Records. As I have described before (2009) and document below, in the
1960s and 1970s, black program directors, general managers, and on-air
talent pushed owners for increased control over management decisions
as well as content of stations like WJLB. The result of that radio rebellion
was that in the 1980s and 1990s, black DJs were key in disseminating
and establishing the sonic signature of contemporary electronic music
including disco, house, techno, and hip hop.
18 Carleton Gholz
This makes WJLB a compelling point of entry for an understanding

of Detroit as a radio-powered listening space. White-owned yet long
associated with the cultivation of a black audience, WJLBs extended
story, from the early years of broadcasting to our contemporary conver-
gence era, as glimpsed by the vertical file, serves as a rich site to engage
the larger history of Detroit radio and provides a counterpoint to larger
national stories and other regional archives.
19411967: Designed for the Future
According to Detroit Free Press (1941b), on March 10, 1941 Governor

Van Wagoner would join owner John Booth to commemorate WJLBs
new studios. The paper reported the name of New York acoustical con-
sultant Sidney Wolf and quoted Booth: Our broadcasting studios, he
said, were designed for the future. We will keep abreast of the latest
radio developments. It would eventually broadcast at 1400 AM.
As Woodford (1965), Brevard (2001), and Minor (2015) discuss, the
E. Azalia Hackley Collection was founded in 1943 by a gift from the
Detroit Musicians Association and named after E. Azalia Hackley, a vocal-
ist, music teacher, and cultural activist from an earlier generation in
Detroit. Clippings from before the founding of the collection deemed
relevant to the new black-focused Hackley Collection were brought over
from the Music and Drama Departments own vertical file. According
to these early clippings, WJLB first began its life as WMBC in 1926.
From the start, it was an independent radio station in a pre-network
era that, as part of its regular programming, sought out immigrant
populations who had come to Detroit for industrial jobs during World
War I. Booth Broadcasting, which took over the station in 1940, was
founded in Detroit by John Booth in 1939 but had roots in his father
Ralph Herman Booths 19th-century newspaper empire. The elder Booth
was one of Detroits most influential citizens. Along with his brother
George, he was part of the early ownership history of the Detroit News as
well as a founder of the Detroit Institute of Arts. He also helped establish
the Cranbrook Educational Community north of Detroit in Bloomfield
Hills. The company would eventually expand beyond Detroit, purchas-
ing radio stations throughout Michigan, as well as Ohio and Indiana.
According to a promotional brochure, The Booth American Story
(HC, 1981f), The sum of these 12 Booth stations is a Great Lakes
broadcasting market of more than 10 million people, greater than either
New York or Los Angeles. But its roots are precisely responsive programming
and community service in each of the seven metropolitan areas.
Two interesting moments stand out in these early clippings. The first
is the new owners early struggles with the initial ethnic programming
of the station. John L. Booth, Sr. bought the station in 1940 and named
it after himself in 1941, when the station changed its call sign and
moved into the then Eaton, now Broderick, Tower that still stands on
Grand Circus Park in downtown Detroit. The tower has recently been
renovated into luxury apartments and the original studios destroyed.
Originally an AM station, a Detroit Free Press clipping (1941a) states
that WJLB began broadcasting on FM the same year, and, according
to notes and research by Cintron (1982), began its first broadcast
program oriented toward the Detroit metropolitan black community
in 1941, [with] the Interracial Goodwill Hour, hosted by Edward
R. Baker. WJLB was a truly modern station, with cutting edge facilities
and a progressive programming attitude indebted to the early days of
broadcasting and government regulations, like the Communications
Act of 1934 described by Hilmes (2014), which attempted to reform
early radios commercial paradigm. But struggles over management and
the programming mission arose from the start. In 1943, a year marked
by major race riots in Detroit, the stations WMBC-era commitment to
foreign language broadcasts began to be phased out (Detroit Free Press,
1943) even as the company was taken to court. The company was tem-
porarily banned for canceling programs which had been broadcasting
since the 1930s (Detroit Free Press, 1948). The suits were closed by the
spring of 1948 (HC, 1948).
The second harbinger moment from the early clippings is the issue
of automation. By the 1950s, Booth Broadcasting was applying for tele-
vision station licenses in multiple cities in Michigan including Detroit
and imagining how new computer-based technologies could help
increase efficiency in its radio operations (HC, 1952). In the fall of 1960,
staff announcers at the AM WJLB and sister FM station WMZK could see
the writing on the wall. A contract between the American Federation of
Television and Radio Artists, a part of the ALF-CIO, and the owners of
Booth Broadcasting was coming to an end with layoffs of announcers
to be replaced by automated equipment imminent (HC, 1960d). Local
newspapers later elaborated that the strike was over alleged speedup
practices and automation (HC, 1960c). An article the next day revealed
a further issue: seven announcers had been fired without severance pay
(HC, 1960b). A Detroit Free Press staff writer described the scene:
It wasnt impressive to look at. Just an L-shaped arrangement of gray

cabinets, a couple of feet higher than a man, with dials and wheels
20 Carleton Gholz
on them. There was a series of clicks, wheels turned, lights blinked

and whirring sounds came out. Those men, keeping close watch,
tossed out such words as programming spotter memory tape
relays. The scene was station WJLB offices, high in a downtown
Detroit building. (Arnold, 1960, p. 16-A)
AFTRA was called in. Booth sued the union (Kirk, 1960). Weeks later,
the strike was still on (HC, 1960a). The culmination of the strike is absent
from the Hackley file, but the specter of automation would continue
to haunt the station. Nevertheless, the strike did not seem to affect the
stations bottom line or long-term prospects. In 1962, journalist Osgood
described WJLB as among the top five independent stations in the
nation in commercial sales for four years running (Osgood, 1962).
Programming and automation may have caused corporate hiccups for
WJLB in its early years but, according to the file, by the birth of the top
40 era, the station had solidified itself as key outlets for entertainment
and news.
19671981: From Playing it Cool to the Sophisticated

Black Adult
The Hackley file contains a full-page advertisement from the Detroit

Free Press in 1966 highlighting the black staff of WJLB. The Tigeradio
1400 staff featured Frantic Ernie Durham, Joltin Joe Howard, Jack
Surrell, Tom Reed, Jan Forman, Senator Bristoe Bryant, Norman
Miller, and George White (Detroit Free Press, 1966). In this ad, the sta-
tion highlights that Polish, German and Greek are still spoken nightly,
and Sunday has a generous portion of religious programs (HC, 1966).
But in the summer of 1967, a rebellion broke on Detroits west side just
a mile north of Motown Records and Detroits New Center area, then
the home of General Motors. The Detroit News reported that the Queen
has put in many hours on the air urging her listeners to play it cool
and preserve law and order though it also reported that then white
General Manager, Tom Warner, had received some abusive calls from
more militant listeners because of its cool it policy (Detroit News, 1967).
In 1968, WJLB dropped its non-black ethnic programming completely
(HC, 1981c). Whether this happened because of pressure from black
staff or listeners is not clear from the archive. But by 1970, the Queen
and others at the station were no longer playing it cool.
The scream strike would end in January 1971 (Wendlend, 1971).
The Queen was to host a call-in show with Police Commissioner John
Nichols who would later run for Mayor that would be called Buzz
the Fuzz (HC, 1971a) but was still on strike when the first broadcast
was to take place (HC, 1971b). By the next week, the strike was over,
and Nichols took calls while the Queen moderated (Kohn, 1971). WJLB
was not the only station plagued with labor strife during this period.
According to the clippings, there was an earlier strike at WGPR in
February of 1969 (Griffin, 1969) and in 1970, the National Association
of Black Media Producers (NABMP) had accused local broadcasters,
except for WCHB, WJLB, WGPR, and (Canadian) CKLW, of failing to
comply with the Communications Act of 1934 (Ingram, 1970). Local
radio and TV stations denied the accusation (Peterson, 1970).
What is most compelling about this post-Rebellion period in the
clippings file is the sense that these years in Detroit, especially for black
audiences, were not merely a time of tumult and strife but also politi-
cal and cultural emergence. Detroit was entering a postcolonial period,
soon to be solidified when Coleman A. Young became the first black
mayor of the City of Detroit in early 1974. Simultaneously, WCHB and
WJLB had been joined by WGPR and as evidenced by the clippings
in the file, competition for the citys black audience was robust. By
1973, Free Press writer Watson could confidently say, [Black radio]s
an institution that will probably be around as long as some folks sea-
son their string beans with hamhocks and others use salt (Watson,
1973). This would include programs dedicated to serious Black music
(Michigan Chronicle, 1974). During this era, young DJs like Donnie
Simpson would become teen hosts of local shows. Simpson had started
as a Teen Reporter at WJLB in 1970 (Michigan Chronicle, 1970a) and
would later become a national radio personality (Michigan Chronicle,
1989b). By 1977, John L. Booth II took over administrative respon-
sibility for the station and in February 1979 moved the station to
new studios on the 20th floor of the City National Bank Building, also
known as the Penobscot (HC, 1981c). According to one clipping, the
station was so independent of major label influence and other radio
networks that by 1979, major record labels like MCA were wondering if
there had been local payola involved (Griffin, 1979). WJLB had clearly
entered its own postcolonial period under Booth II and re-ingratiated
itself to the local community.
By 1980, internal marketing materials describe the Monday through
Saturday lineup at WJLB as Contemporary music and news and spe-
cial features geared to the sophisticated black adult. On Sunday, that
sophisticated programming turned towards Gospel/spiritual music,
church services, community affairs, and public service programming
22 Carleton Gholz
(HC, 1980b). That same year, the station was financially confident
enough to use raising money for local children as a promotional
device. The subject of a station sit-down strike less than a decade ear-
lier, Normal Miller, was now ensconced internally as management and
externally as its public persona. In a letter penned at the beginning of
a brochure for a night with the stars, Miller made sure to highlight
the connection between WJLBs values and the community: All of the
WJLB family extends a warm, heartfelt thanks to you for your partici-
pation. But more important than our thanks and appreciation is that of
the young people whose lives you have touched (HC, 1980a). Millers
note preceded John Booth II and Mayor Youngs proclamation, as well
as ads from national companies like Motown Records, A&M Records,
CBS Records, and local companies like Simpsons Wholesale record
shop in Detroit and Ami Distributors Corp. in nearby Livonia. The air
staff or Super Stokers during this moment were listed as J. Michael
McKay, John Edwards, Martha Jean, Claude Young, Lynn Tolliver, and
Reuben Yabuku.
The stations apparent stability and success did not come without spo-
radic and drastic personnel changes and ongoing struggles over labor
amongst other larger industrial and technological changes in radio. On
December 1, 1980, WJLB went to 97.9 FM (HC, 1981c). By May 1981,
new DJs had been added to the mix, including Keith Bell and Claude
Young. Martha Jean moved to the noon hour (HC, 1981g). The station
emphasized its efforts to meet the needs and interests of [the] Detroit
metropolitan black community, including religious programs overseen
by the Queen, editorials by Jim Ingrim and Carl Rowan, a talk show by
Sid McCoy, and even a show called Labor Looks at the Issues, hosted
by Tom Turner, President of the Detroit chapter of the AFL-CIO (HC,
1981c). But the Queens regular noon slot was eventually moved to a far
less inspiring 5 am6 am slot. Cintron (1982) marks this key moment in
the history of the station:
This adjustment signals an overall change in the stations concept

of programming. In addition to rearranging its program schedule
and highlighting other disc jockeys such as Claude Young, Keith
Bell, and John Edwards, WJLB has begun to play the softer less brash
Rhythm and Blues records interspersing them occasionally with cuts
that are familiar to or accepted by black audiences but are performed
by white artists such as movie theme song Arthur. These altera-
tions in the stations [sic] overall concept of music programming
are based on information gathered by the stations [sic] in-house
researchers.
Cintron continues, by hand, on the back of her notes:
[WJLB] has its own music researchers on staff to compliment the pro-
gram director, and though the station acknowledges the data provided
by Arbitron and other similar service it has its own market research-
ers and other personnel who do nothing but call and survey listeners.
The result is a computerized play list where each record is dictated.
This computerization is quite unique. Most black radio stations in
Detroit rely solely on the research and creativity of the program
director and the input of the respective disc jockeys.
The 1980s census reported what many knew already: Detroits black
population had soared. Marketing material from the Hackley file attests
to the influence of black audiences in the Greater Detroit area which,
according to market maps, spread beyond Detroits Wayne County
into Oakland and Macomb counties to the north, and Livingston and
Washtenaw counties to the west:
Reach! To get it all in Metro Detroit you need The Market within the
Market that 63% Black Detroit the WJLB FM 98 Listener! Latest
1980 U.S Census figures show Detroits Black population to be more
than 758,939 strong. You dont have Metro Detroit covered if you
dont have the powerful reach of Detroits Black Contemporary station
WJLB FM 98 (HC, 1981e).
Additional marketing sheets discussed the stations award winning

news (HC, 1981d) and perhaps most importantly included coverage
maps showing how WJLB competed successfully against competitors
like the disco-oriented WLBS out of Mt. Clemens (HC, 1981b), the
jazz-focused WJZZ (HC, 1981a), and R&B-oriented WGPR (HC, 1981b).
By 1981, the station could confidently print flyers that put their top
40 records on one side (Al Jarreaus Were In This Love Together was
number 1) with a Nefertiti silhouette on the back advertising a benefit
for the Afro-American Museum of Detroit (1981h). As the Hackley folder
witnesses, the struggles of stations like WJLB in the 1960s and 1970s
made this black cultural appeal possible. Marketing demographics and
on-air personalities had made it necessary.
19821999: Strong Songs
And then there was Mojo.

There are not many radio DJs, from WJLB or any other local station,
who have their own vertical biography file in the Hackley Collection.
24 Carleton Gholz
One of them is the piano playing dee jay Jack Surrell who performed
and curated records in Detroit from the early 1950s through the 1960s.
He did a tour on WJLB in the mid-1960s and died in 2003 (May, 2003).
Another is the Queen herself who, after leaving WJLB, would start her
own radio station in Detroit WQBH and broadcast through the 1990s,
dying in early 2000 (Kiska and Hurt, 2000). But the mysterious Charles
Electrifying Mojo Johnsons file seems singular in noticing journalists
attempts to understand what draws radio audiences to their chosen,
ethereal, heroes. Included in the clippings is the extended profile by
then Free Press writer W. Kim Heron while Mojo was still at WGPR in the
fall of 1981 (Heron, 1981), numerous clippings by Jim McPharlin includ-
ing a short piece announcing his imminent move to WJLB in the summer
of 1982 (McFarlin, 1982), a feature from Detroits then main alternative
paper the Metro Times (Borey, 1982), a Michigan State University law
students fan dedication to Mojo (Wofsy, 1983), and consistent check-
ins on Mojos job status deep in to the 1990s by Michigan Chronicle
writer Steve Holsey.
Mojos moment at WJLB had been precipitated by transitions in local
programming. WDRQ went on the air in early 1982 with a focus on
continuous music and directly challenged WJLB for leading ratings.
A number of clippings from the file foreground the battle in the market. In
1982, Norman Miller was replaced as General Manager on WJLB by Verna
Green. Michigan Chronicle writer Nina Eman drew attention to Greens lack
of experience: Asked about Ms. Greens lack of broadcast credentials (she
has none), Ms. [Carol] Prince [WJLB representative] replied that the new
station manager was selected primarily for her management ability. We
needed an organizational specialist (Eman, 1982). Throughout Detroit,
radio stations were changing formats and call signs. Patrick Gilbert of the
Detroit Monitor attempted to describe all the shifts, summarizing WJLBs as
personality emphasis, 1982; shift from black to urban progressive with
frequency shift from 1400 AM, 1980 (Gilbert, 1982). James Alexander
joined the staff as program director in the fall and in November of 1982,
Green and WJLB cancelled all church services on Sunday (Walker-Tyson,
1982). By 1983 the station was playing more music. Local newspapers
played up the competition in their pages (McFarlin, 1983).
The rise of new stations like WDRQ as well as continuing competi-
tion from WLBS pushed WJLB to buy out its on-air competition from
WGPR. What was significant about Mojo was that he was touching a
black audience but also, local journalists noted, a crossover audience
of suburban whites. As Free Press writer Gary Graff reminded his readers,
It was the areas black oriented stations that took the new music styles
first, and it was the Electrifying Mojo first at WGPR-FM and now at
WJLB-FM who exposed commercial radio to white acts like the B-52s,
Talking Heads and Lene Lovich while the album rockers stuck with Led
Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, et al. (Graff, 1983).
By 1985 WJLB was using a new slogan declaring itself the home of
strong songs and accompanied this language with the image of black
male bodybuilders flexing on TV advertisements in response to WDRQ
(McFarlin, 1985). But the competition switched formats and Mojo was
sent packing at the peak of his powers. In 1988, morning talk personal-
ity John Mason from WJLB had become the most popular on-air dee-
jay for Michigan Chronicle readers behind Rosetta Hines from WJZZ and
Clarence Foody Rome at WGPR. Writer Steve Holsey noted though
the irony that Mojo still came in fourth.
It is interesting to note that Mojo, who left radio in 87, still managed
to get enough votes to secure fourth place. Detroiter Nazrine White,
wrote, Mojo is missing from the airwaves but he will never be
forgotten. She added, I miss the Prince songs! (Holsey, 1988).
In 1989, Mason would win the survey, receiving a plaque from Holsey
(Michigan Chronicle, 1989a). Just a few years later, Holsey would com-
ment on Mojos departure from another local station in 1992, stating
that Mojo is unique, an oasis in the desert of basic radio sameness
(Holsey, 1992). Mojo would continue to DJ on and off at a number of
local stations through the 1990s before vanishing from the Mothership
in which he claimed to have been brought. Like the Queen before him,
Mojo had mixed entertainment with a powerful appeal to the imagina-
tion, and for a few years WJLB had been a willing collaborative outlet.
But as the archive notes, the story of black radio in Detroit has always
been a search for talent and the tension between that talent and the
bottom lines of market share. Despite his extensive fan base, Mojo was
not immune to those forces.
2000Present: Long Memories
The Hackley archive breaks off in the late 1990s with only a few clippings
from the 2000s. By January 1995, the Michigan Chronicle could proudly
report to its readers that WJLB had beaten out WJR as the No. 1 radio sta-
tion in the Detroit radio market with adults 12-plus (Michigan Chronicle,
26 Carleton Gholz
1995). In 1997, WCHB moved from jazz to urban, hiring a number of

ex-WJLB jocks including Electrifying Mojo and Billy T (Garner, 1997).
Verna Green would eventually be promoted to general manager for both
WMXD and WJLB (Michigan Chronicle, 1997). The file then jumps to
2002. The gap is telling. After the Telecommunications Act in 1996,
Booth merged with another company and then, after over fifty years,
sold WJLB. The station would change a handful of times before eventu-
ally landing with Clear Channel in 1999. A few years later, the archive
picks up again with an article about the stations relationship with
Eminem. Like Berry Gordy before him, the rapper realized that to make
it in Detroit during the 1990s required that one make it on WJLB. At
one point in his movie 8 Mile, Eminem re-enacts the moment from his
own career when he approached WJLB with his music. Johnathon DJ
Bushman Dunnings remembered the moment for local journalist John
Smyntek. Cinema verite? Not precisely. Those with long memories
will remember that just after the time in which the film is set, WJLB
was picketed by local rappers for not playing any of their recordings
(Smyntek, 2002). The Telecommunications Act caused major corporate
shifts for local radio and, at the same time, as I have noted elsewhere,
left Detroits Golden Era rappers off the air (Gholz, 2009). Eminems
success allowed a certain amount of nostalgia in his breakout film but
the silence in the archive speaks to a more uncomfortable truth.
Epilogue: Insomnia in Detroit
I was in Ann Arbor standing on the corner of Stadium and University

(1972). Its where Discount Records used to be. I had just started
working at this Rock and Roll radio station, WAAM. I went to Discount
Records to pick up some music. When I came out, for a moment in
time, I was locked into the scenery. I was thinking about what the
mission of radio should be. I saw all of these different cultures, eth-
nicities passing by me. I was just standing on the corner watching
them. Old people, young people, black people, white people, Native
Americans people from the whole world. I was thinking about how
radio stations fight for market share. They look at radio through this
narrow prism. I thought about how we might look at things differ-
ently. I also thought about the multi-layers of peer pressure and how
people are confined to their own little prisons by the people they
hang around with and the people they want to please or people
they dont wish to offend in any way. They say to the group, What
would you like for me to do? What would you like to listen to so Ill
be pleasing in your sight? You like to go here? This is where I like to

go. You like this music? Okay, this is the music I like. That is them
in the daytime, but at night, people dont have the pressure of their
peers. They are forced to be themselves and to take on their own
adventures. (The Electrifying Mojo Patricola, 2005)
It was cold and damp at 2 am when I started to drive to Farmington

Hills. Dinero, a young grad from Easter Michigan University let us
in. From 2 to 3 am there had been pre-recorded mixes by DJ Fingers,
but from 3 to 5 am there would be Club Insomnia. Marketed as Two
Hours that Will House Your Body, Insomnia has been going on for
over ten years. The DJs on this night are DaNeil Mitchell, Reggie
Hotmix Harrell, and, the only paid member of the group, Kim The
Spin Doctor James. Harrell remembers making pause button mixes
as early as 1978 and sending 30 minute mixes to the Electrifying Mojo
to play on his show in the early 1980s. James position is The Mix
Show Coordinator for two Clear Channel stations in Detroit (WJLB
and WXMD FM). His first gig was at Henry Ford Community College
in 1982. He was paid $50. Missing tonight is regular resident DJ Cent
who plays for the queer ballroom community in Detroit (Bailey, 2013,
p. 125). It has been over 25 years since the Electrifying Mojo was on
WJLB but on-air DJs who mix their records live on the air still exist.
Barely.
After over a decade of consolidation and deregulation within the
radio industry, WJLB had been bought and moved in 2009 from its
art deco Penobscot Building studios to a western suburb of Detroit
called Farmington Hills. Clear Channel, the stations owner since 1999,
owns a number of stations in Detroit which they consolidated into
an anonymous, three story, brown office building across from an old
farmers cemetery on Haggerty Road just south of 13 Mile. In 2010, as
I completed my dissertation dedicated to Detroits music industry after
the departure of Motown in 1972, I made inquiries to find out what had
happened to the internal archive of the station. Was there, for instance,
a file cabinet dedicated to the station filled with audio tape recordings
of old shows, videos of events, or perhaps even an archivist whose job it
was to take care of the history of the station so someone like me could
hear it? The answer was no. I was asked to come to the station and was
handed one manila file folder of photocopied advertising research and
promotional materials that focused largely on the previous decade.
There was nothing to listen to. Everything, I was led to believe, had
been thrown away in the move out of the Penobscot.
28 Carleton Gholz
This experience, among others, pushed me in 2012 to form the Detroit

Sound Conservancy (DSC). After a decade of involvement documenting
Detroit music history, first as a journalist and fan, later as an academic
and media scholar, I realized that the archive itself was a significant
story in the telling or non-telling of Detroits place within moder-
nity. I realized that the basic documents to tell that story had been
relegated, sometimes literally, to the dustbin. The existence of a jour-
nalistic trail of clippings from over 70 years of activism by the Hackley
Collection made the episodic story above possible. But they are not
enough. Clear Channel may not need the cultural memory of its Detroit
holdings, but Detroiters do. We need to hear the Queens scream
as well as her invocations to reach out across the airwaves. We need to
hear how Claude Rocker Young, Sr. got his name, and how his son,
years later, channeled those experiences into a new soundscape during
the early 1990s. In personal correspondence with former DJ Reuben
Yabuku, current marketing executive Lee Robinson, and former General
Manager Verna Green, it is clear that there are serious holes in the verti-
cal file, holes that I hope to address in the future. Some of these materi-
als, like the early-morning mixes of the Club Insomnia DJs, exist online
via SoundCloud. Most still lie in basements, shoeboxes, and milk-crates,
or, at the bottom of trash heaps, resulting in a history of Detroit, espe-
cially in the era before widespread home taping and cassette use, that
is largely mute. Why would Ken Cockrel then City Council member,
and activist take the time to discuss radio in 1975? How did music
allow his imagination to think through alternative futures? Based on
the archive that exists publically for researchers, the answer is difficult
to reconstruct. In part, thats why I donated a compilation tape of the
Electrifying Mojo from my personal collection in 2014 to the DSC to be
added to our archive and posted on our website. As of this writing, it has
received over 7,000 plays (Detroit Sound Conservancy, 2014).
A final note: posting radio shows so that they are, once again, audible,
is just part of the activism that lies ahead for groups like the DSC and
researchers such as myself. In addition, we must struggle with the archive
and not just see it as a transparent window onto the past. An off-handed
remark in the Hackley file highlights the conundrum. In the archive there
is a Masters thesis by former Wayne State Mass Communication masters
graduate Esperanza Cintron (the only known copy in World Cat) as well
as notes developed for the thesis, with hand-written edits by the author.
In her notes, Cintron presents her take on the Queens aural signature:
The Queens style is a cross between Dear Abby, Prophet Jones, and
Wolfman Jack. She gives advice, prays, preaches, and has played
songs that are guaranteed to make any normal teenager wiggle.

A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Ms. Steinberg relies heavy on her
husky somewhat diluted southern drawl and an occasional bit of black
dialect thrown in for good measure (Cintron, 1982).
The newspaper columnist Dear Abby and rock n roll radio wildman
Wolfman Jack will likely be familiar to readers. But Prophet Jones was a
regional voice with tremendous influence during the time leading up to
the rebellion. He is largely unknown outside of Detroit and rarely dis-
cussed in Detroit histories. According to historian Tim Retzloff, Joness
popularity as well as his ambivalent sexuality was much discussed and
talked about at the time (Retzloff, 2002). The complete absence of
Jones or for that matter DJ Cent from the Hackley vertical file then
is a significant aporia in the collection and points to the need to queer
Detroits media histories. Following Retzloff as well as self-proclaimed
archival queer Charles Morris (Morris, 2006), I remind the reader that
archival work is an active practice and the story I offer here is meant to
create the grounds for and call into being such work. In Detroit, at least,
we need to read such creative research so that we might still tune in to
such fresh ideas on the radio.
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2
On Tape1: Cassette Culture in
Edinburgh and Glasgow Now
Kieran Curran
Introduction
The following piece is based around my interest in exploring the pecu-

liarity of cassettes making a comeback in the present historical context.
Related to this is the fact that engagement with and usage of tapes is
an aspect of particular sorts of DIY2/experimental music scenes. I chose
to approach this subject through a focus on scenes in Glasgow and in
Edinburgh; it is based and organised around interviews and observation.
Throughout 2013, I spoke with fans, musicians, promoters, record label
runners, and all manner of other interrelated permutations of these cate-
gories. Underlying these conversations and observations was a sense of
why (on a micro level) the use of tape as a format for releasing music was
residually popular amongst independent musicians in the city where
I live (Edinburgh) and where I often travel for gigs (Glasgow).
There will never be any peace...
It is 11 April 2014 at a small venue just south of the city centre of

Edinburgh, The Wee Red Bar. Set within the main quadrangle of what was
the formerly autonomous Edinburgh College of Art (now a constituent
part of the much larger institution the University of Edinburgh), it is a
long-standing location for DIY gigs of variegated genres dub reggae,
indie pop, electro, avant-garde noise amongst others. Tonight, there are
about 70 people in attendance (including myself and my friend Lilly)
to see a gig headlined by the Flower-Corsano Duo, a venerated noise-rock
combo whose sets consist of extensive improvisations between drum-
mer Chris Corsano and guitarist Mick Flower. Opening tonight are a band
(scratch that: perhaps entity is a better word) called Acrid Lactations,
33
34 Kieran Curran
based in the Kinning Park area of Glasgow. Their 20-minute set is a

composite mesh of buzzing, broken keyboards, trumpet skronk and
squeak, signal processed feedback, the clanging of found objects, and
the mainly abstract, non-verbal vocalising of its two members Stuart
Arnott and Susan Fitzpatrick. Yet the spectacle of improv noise-making
is cut through towards the end of the set, when Susan walks into the
crowd (The Wee Red has no stage as such, and the audience are at eye
level with performers) and begins to repeatedly sing an improvised (but
tuneful) lyric in a parodic, neo-soul voice:
There will never be any peace,

Until God is seated at the conference table
Susan throws in intermittent whoos and come ons into the mix,
exhorting the rather stereotypically composed noise music crowd (mainly
darkly clad in jeans mainly wearing plaid shirts, mainly in their late
20s/early 30s and male) to join in. They look on detachedly, awkwar
and slightly sullen; predictably, they dont get involved. The humour-
ous intervention of the popular cultural sphere into a scene akin to
Chris Attons popular avant-garde (Atton, 2012) exposed some of
the generic taboos (i.e. an almost fanatical devotion to no melody!)
of improvised music. Yet the experience of their live performance
and the sense of tension, of incipient laughter, and of the genuinely
unexpected was palpable.
I had spoken to Stuart and Susan about cassette culture in Glasgow
months prior to this, and Stuarts record label Total Vermin has been
an aesthetically astute user of cassettes as a medium of release. Why
(and, indeed, how) would you commemorate the idiosyncrasy of their
performance in a live context? And why would you particularly wish to
do so on tape? What was the appeal of cassettes to those engaged in the
DIY improvised music world?
Background
The cassette was invented in 1964, and its success as a format3

was boosted by the later development of the Sony Walkman the
first mass-produced, incredibly popular, personalised music playing
device. As the predominant medium4 for listening to music in the
1980s and 1990s, the Walkman occupies somewhat of a nostalgic
place in the collective memories of people of a certain age (such
as myself) soundtracking growing up, and walking to school in
On Tape 35
temporal increments of magnetic tape, referred by some cultural crit-

ics as a potentially liberating micro-narrative of personal experience
(Chambers, 1990). Despite its initial transgressive status as a device
which encouraged a public, mobile demonstration of private music
listening experience the legacy of the Walkman is alive in the vast
proliferation of phones and MP3 players, most of which allow person-
ally curated mixes to be easily accessed and played. Such listening
practice is now surely the norm:
Most human beings adjust, because they must, to altered, even radi-
cally altered conditions. This is already marked in the first genera-
tion of such shifts. By the second and third generations the initially
enforced conditions are likely to have become if not the new social
norms for at many levels of intensity the conditions may still be
resented at least the new social perspective, its everyday common
sense. (Williams, 1983, p. 187)
Tape culture also occupied a key space in 1980s independent music.

Snatch Tapes and Statutory Tapes (particularly their Rising from the
Red Sand compilations) produced collections which were contem-
porary documentations of fiercely, aggressively avant-garde industrial
music in the early part of the decade. The C86 tape curated and
released by the NME in 1986 was an apocryphal moment in indie
pop history, presented a series of songs by bands such as Bogshed,
The Wedding Present and Glasgows own The Pastels which became
emblematic of a certain shambling, lo-fi pop ethic. And in their
respective variegated and eclectic ways, Olympia, WAs K Records,
Ohios Siltbreeze and the Dunedin label Xpressway were iconic indies
who released a high percentage of their output on tape. Regardless of
these non-commercial victories, sales of tapes bottomed out in the mid-
2000s, with various newspaper articles in the UK proclaiming the death
of the cassette in 2007.5
Nostalgia Retro Object Aura
The creation of an International Cassette Store Day in September 2013

seemed to suggest a media zeitgeist moment, and was accompanied by
some quite idealistic sentiment. Jen Long one of the originators of
the initiative, and head of her own tape label Kissability stated that,
unlike Record Store Day, her event was less about supporting shops
and more about celebrating the cassette format that has been making
36 Kieran Curran
a comeback for a while (Long, 2013). This apparently inaugural event

was somewhat controversial, as Glasgows Volcanic Tongue record
shop had initiated an (admittedly non-international) event akin to
this in 2012. Of course, the unveiling of a cassette store day was not
welcomed unequivocally. For instance, some message board comments
on a Guardian newspaper article contained a modicum of vituperative,
keyboard warrior rage. They also proposed an alternative method of
marking the day:
Cassettes were utter shit ... Cassette store day should involve a mass
smashing of the pieces of shit which are left in circulation, it would
be carthartic [sic] for me, I know that much.
In one of my first interviews for this essay, Ali Robertson one half of
Edinburgh improv group Usurper, and mainstay of long-standing tape/
CD-r label and promoter Giant Tank found the resurgence of interest
in tapes to be a bit odd:
I know a lot of younger folk are putting stuff out on tape, and I find
that a bit peculiar. Somebody of my age6 has the nostalgia of dubbing
tapes, or taping songs off the radio, and the next generation dont
have that ... I wonder: is it just a fashion thing? I spoke to my mate
and said Im doing this interview about tape culture, and he said: just
say you want your album put in Urban Outfitters.
For Robertson, there was a potential sense of cool capitalisms exploita-

tive tendencies at work based on an uncanny ability to transform
apparently oppositional, or anti-establishment elements of a historic
counter-culture into a heroic ability to maximise profit margins
(McGuigan, 2009). In the era of dictaphone tape necklaces and ethi-
cally dubious, over-priced t-shirts emblazoned with the BASF logo, Ali
Robertson showed a jadedness with regard to the consistent process of
extracting surplus value out of anything and everything:
Were living through these times of just trying to squeeze every last
bit of monetary worth out of stuff. And thats like that shit Tapes,
hey! Lets see if we can milk this!
Yet aside from the cynical outlook, Paul Etherington a long-standing

fixture of the Edinburgh indie scene as a fan and sometimes DJ
identified a core impulse motivating the tape buyer, gleaned from his
On Tape 37
experience of decades of going to gigs that of scarcity, and of perceived

uniqueness:
I think its basically the culture of owning something which is when

its gone its gone. It all comes down to the limited edition thing.
And the only things that are really, truly limited edition now are
probably vinyl records, which are expensive to do with runs and
everything. CDs are easy to put in your computer and burn. With
a cassette you cant easily replicate that for someone else [and]
the cost barrier is much lower than it is for vinyl ... you can buy a
set of blank tapes and make them yourself ... And my experience as
a buyer is that the cassettes go so quickly youve got to get in there
sharpish.
Similarly, Ali spoke of this appeal as a seller of tapes after gigs and at
record fairs; their novelty and rarity value make them easier to market:
A CD is harder to sell than a tape. Not everyone has a tape to

tape deck in their house these days (laughter breaks out), whereas
everybody has a CD burner. So why would you want one of those?
Why not take advantage of this incipient demand? Perhaps uncon-

sciously aware of soon-to-recur fashions, Unpop was set up in 2009 as a
quarterly club night in Edinburghs Wee Red Bar by myself, Adam Neil
and Amy Baggott. With its roots in the Indiesoc of Edinburgh University,
the goal was to put together a night devoted to various strips of indie
pop without too much of a consciously retro aesthetic. We decided to
make mixtapes for the early comers to our night, serving as a mix of good
tunes that we were into at a given time, and as an artefact or memento of
the night. Nostalgia partially informed this for us all of us had, at one
point or another, regularly taped songs off the radio (in Adams case, culti-
vating an extensive, personal archive of the legendary BBC radio DJ John
Peels show), or curated our own mixtapes for ourselves or for friends.
We bought our tapes from Tapeline, a company based in Leeds and
a core component part of the contemporary resurgence of tapes. These
folk seemed to supply a vast number of the tapes to independent artists
and labels around the UK and Ireland. Adam the organisational driv-
ing force behind Unpop has had many dealings with the company.
Our mixes were given away for free at the beginning of the night, were
limited in number (largely due to the painstaking logistics of home
taping) and were not available to stream or to buy online. I found that
38 Kieran Curran
their appeal to the club-goers came mainly down to their status as an

object they looked nice, had unique artwork hand-drawn by Amy, and
the tapes were in different colours (not just monochrome). It is fair to
say that very few of Unpops audience actually listened to the things,
yet there was definitely a distinct difference in the ritual of listening for
those who chose to do so. As Adam put it:
The medium is important. You listen to a tape very differently than

you would listen to a CD or a vinyl record. And people want a physi-
cal thing theyre sick, in some ways, of clicking music, and too
much music on your hard disk.
In the age of wholesale streaming of music, the importance of a physical

presence is underlined by indie pop label Soft Power,7 run by the hus-
band and wife team of Graeme and Bek Galloway, based in Livingston
near Edinburgh. In quite idealistic terms, Graeme described to me
the manifesto of Soft Power when we met up in the basement of an
unnameable Rose Street pub in Edinburgh:
The premise of Soft Power is that we release music that we love. We

dont really care whether it sells one copy or five hundred copies, but
we release physical product. The real thing with us whether its vinyl
or whether its tape is that the buyer of the music gets something that
is tactile. Something they can buy, and hold and love and cherish. As
opposed to buying and paying for a download, enjoying the music
and loving the music but not actually having something that you
can have in thirty years time.
The aesthetic dimension to their label is unsurprisingly perhaps,

given the devotion to producing memorable objects crucial. Graeme
describes the process of sleeve design for a particular band, Dublins
September Girls:
That was their first release and it was an interesting process because
they wanted to use completely sustainable materials, They spent two
weeks trying to find the right kind of paper because the girls were
really adamant and we were into that. They gave us the artwork, and it
was really beautiful and we wanted to make them something special.
Graeme and Beks relationship in its early stages was bound up with
tape culture and sending compilations to each other the roots of the
On Tape 39
couples relationship lie in exchanging mixtapes through the Royal Mail

in the 1980s):
We used to do mixtapes for each other, and when we were courting

we used to send each other tapes she used to live in Bournemouth
and I lived in Scotland.
The physical manifestation that is the musical object holds a specific

appeal for Stuart Arnott (referenced in the introduction to this piece),
but in contrast with Graemes perspective incorporates a reluctance
towards being sentimentally attached to it:
Its a physical object you interact with, and theres a mechanical

process thats reproducing the sound. So you do have a more solid
relationship with it. It does sound romantic, but I dont feel like its
sentimental. I do know people who have tattoos of cassette tapes,
and thats undeniably sentimental.
This leads to the appeal of the specific object of the cassette itself. Good
Press is a comic book/zine shop and small gallery space, situated in one
part of the iconic Mono store in the Merchant City area of Glasgow city
centre. They also sell a small quantity of cassettes. The gallery hosted an
exhibition called A History Of, which invited attendees to make their
own mix tapes in the space itself, and to add their own specific art-work
(or not, depending on taste). It was a success, and somehow timely. A
core of what I spoke about with Matt and Jess had to do with the cas-
sette and cassette sleeve design as objects:
M: Theyve got a spine thats a designers standpoint but there are

more surfaces on it to look at, its like the gatefold record. The thing
I instantly think of with a tape is like collage as well its that you see
the artwork would be cut and paste and youd see a dirty line on it. It
feels appealing in the same way a record feels appealing.
J: CDs suffer from the mass-produced nature of CDs. If someone
makes a CD theyll sit next to all your other CDs in the kitchen with
stuff from HMV.
Tapes thus represent a specific feel and have a uniqueness; important,

given their contemporary currency as more niche, rarefied objects,
and despite their (ultimately) mass-produced nature. Yet retrospection,
romanticism and nostalgia did not figure in Matt and Jesss take on their
40 Kieran Curran
appeal. Matt spoke of his lack of interest in nostalgia, and hinted at the
unpopularity of tapes amongst others:
I do remember having tapes, but I dont put that nostalgia down

for me personally. I like tapes because of what they look like but
I would imagine that nostalgia is prevalent for a lot of people. But
lets say tapes carry on being popular some people arent gonna
have that.
Adam Todd of Edinburgh indie pop band The Spook School had regu-
lar exposure to tapes being played in our Dads car, but never really
made mixtapes, or had mixtapes made for me by friends his pre-
dominant mode of music consumption was through compact disc. Yet
the cheapness, portability and ease of tape recording technology was a
core aspect of their early music as well as the unique and appealing
sound of live drums, or overdriven, lo-fi, in the red guitar recorded
to tape. Of course, tapes can present problems as music carriers
finicky tape players eating cassettes,8 their deterioration in sound
quality over time, and the almost auto-destruction of poorly made
tapes snapping or unfurling. Yet this was certainly a constituent part
of its appeal. David Keenan a critical historian of early Industrial and
Noise music (Englands Hidden Reverse), regular contributor to The Wire
and record store/label owner (Glasgows Volcanic Tongue) noted the
specific utility of the format of the cassette for noise music. Cassettes
are unpredictable as they are, and manifestly different sonically with
every play:
Noise music can actually make play of accidentals ... pop music, or
indie music, does not embrace accidentals its very very deliberate.
But the cassette is perfect for noise music the medium sounds like
the music it was being used for.
When talking with Ali Robertson, I asked about the combination of ideal-
ism and craftiness involved in tape production and the practical nature of
the cheapness of the format (a point Ill return to later):
I wouldnt say that tape is the perfect format for everything Ive ever
recorded. I put stuff on tape and I hear the nice warm hiss ... but that
drowns out the miniscule click sounds Im making ... so sometimes
its gotta be a CD. I was going to say sometimes its gotta be vinyl
no times has it gotta be vinyl. Its just too expensive.
On Tape 41
Many of the conversations I had brought up the appeal of the object

Keenan referred to cassettes having a nice cigarette box size, and
Xpressway cassettes as embodying pure aura. Ali Robertson com-
mented on liking the feel of it, Graeme to the fact that their tapes have
got to look great. It seems that the specificity of the format underlines
the excitement of the quest to amass a collection of meaningful objects
even leading to a conception of an imaginary past. Walter Benjamins
dissection of the quasi-mystical motives for collecting neatly connects
with this:
The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of

individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the
final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them ... as he holds
them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their
distant past as though inspired (Benjamin, 2000, p. 62).
Modernism Postmodernism Salvage
For others such as Zully Adler,9 an American artist in his early 20s, recently
based in Glasgow as a postgraduate student and head of the label Goaty
Tapes the effect of the contemporary resurgent interest in tapes would be
economically minimal. Still, Zully thinks initiatives such as Cassette Store
Day could ultimately benefit so-called mom n pop record stores:
A tape is just a tape, its a commodity, and Urban Outfitters has every
right to sell them as anywhere else if thats gonna bring in an extra
couple hundred extra dollars, by all means ... but at the end of the
day, whos really making money on Cassette Store Day? Its that indie
record store thats on the precipice of bankruptcy as it is.
Zully was also somewhat critical of the notion that the whole enterprise
was necessarily imbued with youthful nostalgia for an imagined past:
I think that when we consider older, outmoded technologies we

assume that any relationship to them is going to hinge on nostalgia.
But at this point, so many technologies have come and gone, and
when theyve gone they havent really gone. They havent been com-
pletely devalorised; theyve just been devalued they still exist, they
can still be used; we encounter them. So it wouldnt be a nostalgic
thing. Most of the people who are coming to tapes now are people
like me and you, who arent really old enough to have used them
42 Kieran Curran
and revisit them, and the ones who are old enough have used them
straight through, pretty continuously.
The sense of a continuity in being interested in tapes was something

which David Keenan identified when I conversed with him on the topic.
He was emphatic in underlining the consistent embrace of tape as both
a musical instrument and as a format for releasing music in the often
transnationally collaborative avant-garde/noise world. He also pointed
to the importance of the record as an object:
People want something in their hands that they can hold, they want
a relationship with the artist again and I think thats why thats
come back. But again, historically, noise and avant-garde under-
ground music have never stopped using cassettes. Weve stocked cas-
settes in our shop from day one ... cassettes have never gone away,
and they never will, because they have something specific to them
that is impossible to replicate using any other medium.
Total Vermin the aforementioned label run by Stuart Arnott exempli-

fies what Keenan refers to here. Operating since the mid-2000s, they have
released approximately 80 tapes, mainly in the sphere of avant-garde, DIY
noise-making. These days their recordings are primarily sold online, and
secondarily at the merch table at shows. Arnott has also released runs
of CD-rs. The music is generally atonal, somewhat abrasive, but with a
playful, subversive and self-deprecating sensibility that is shared with Ali
Robertsons Usurper (indeed, they have frequently collaborated artis-
tically). I procured an example of this from Stuart Total Vermin #70,
credited to the absurdist (yet somehow timely) pseudonym Lovely
Mr Honkey and the Acrid Lactations Jubilee Chorus. It is a work presented
with handmade, slyly subversive art and neo-dadaist liner notes:
Syntactic pegs afloat in a semantic void

A hand among the pinks and marigolds
The mutagenesis of the Booboisie
When based in Manchester, Stuart felt a sense of definite crossover between

generic categories/scenes (something he feels is the case within Glasgow,
as a medium-sized city), and the embrace of tapes felt uncontrived:
A lot of pals also put stuff out on cassettes, sourced from Tapeline ...
there was quite a wide range of things happening. Noise, psychedelic
On Tape 43
stuff, indie. And it didnt even seem to be a decision that had to be

made at that point. Everyone listened to tapes anyway ... My friend
Sophie was in a band called Hot Pants Romance, and they put out
their first stuff on tape ... and I engineered that tape, asking the
band to move closer or further away from the built-in microphone
to achieve balance!
David Keenan refers to the pioneering capabilities inherent in broken

technology, which points also to the hidden possibilities inherent in
apparently obsolete technology:
Where technology is at its best is where it becomes broken, where it

becomes fucked up, where it stops working the way it is supposed to
when it reverses, almost you can see how Jimi Hendrix this great
modernist privileged feedback. Feedback was the absolute terror of
the jobbing musician, of the session hack ... Hendrix elevated this
to one of the central building blocks of his entire music. Throbbing
Gristle even more so they made the mistake the central way they
built a language up. Modernism has always done that.
Keenans perspective ties in to an extent with Brian Winstons identi-

fication of the machinations of the media technology industry, serv-
ing to restrict the radical potential of the latest development and,
at the same, bringing the exploiters of the previous new thing into
the fold (Winston, 1998, p. 13). If radical possibilities have been
discarded by the mainstream, then why cant the underground seize
upon these?
A belief in the specific possibility of modernist artistic expression
is one which Keenan sees as something which can be bound up with
refusal; it dovetails with the idea of the sense of the past as a site of
unfulfilled promise, an antidote to a retromaniac, inattentive present
(Reynolds, 2010), or as a space in which hauntological ghosts and
spectres abound (Fisher, 2014). Tapes are also potentially a site for
salvagepunk dtournment; a reappropriation and revision of what is
apparently detritus (Calder Williams, 2011). Whether this is true or not
is, of course, up for debate. Yet, in the context of my interviews here
particularly with those on the indiepop side of the spectrum I felt a
palpable impulse towards homage and recreation. Unpop, The Spook
School and Paul Etheringtons taste in music is not one of a modern-
ist project to make it new, but both consciously and unconsciously
refers to past genre forms and aesthetics (Jameson, 1990). Our mixtapes
44 Kieran Curran
are to some extent, at least periodic odes to the likes of C86, or to

K Records International Pop Underground compilations. This is not
to say that innovation is absent, but rather that the motivating fac-
tor isnt formalist progression; perhaps a neat summation would be
Pauls remark on the construction of mixtapes: Theres a craft to it, of
stitching it together. This stitching together of older reference points
is reflected in other aesthetics, in a broader sense the cassette version
of Deerhunters latest album Monomania, for instance, is quite closely
indebted to the graphic design style of Atlantic Records cassettes from
the 1980s.
Outsider Internet Economics
A sense emerged of a definite connection between the embrace of cas-

settes and an engagement with a certain form of outsider culture. Zully
Adler identified the appeal of an eccentric home-recorded aesthetic in
terms of his Goaty Tapes label:
Ive definitely put out my fair share of power electronics, and extremely
abstract improvised music ... but I would say the core of the tapes that
Ive released revolves around more eccentric takes on popular genres ...
The bands that I usually release there are all sorts of tag-lines for
them you know, loners, outsiders. And of course these people arent
loners or outsiders I talk to them pretty regularly. The point being
something attracts me to people working in these intimate settings,
and the domestic qualities of the sound that can be transmitted
through the music.
Paul Etherington referred to the appeal of the format as an identification

with being in with the out crowd looking at something which has
apparently been broadly (or popularly) dismissed or derided and essen-
tially rolling with it. David Keenan saw great significance and poign-
ance in the specific situatedness of DIY home recordings, particularly in
terms of challenging, abrasive noise music:
You dont go into this neutral space that is specifically designed

for making music. A lot of these guys did make sound and records
in their bedrooms. And theres something compulsive about that,
theres something diaristic about it as well. And Ive often found that
a lot of the great industrial music its not like a performance, but
some kind of super personal hermetic broadcast from the other side
On Tape 45
of lonely ... Theres something very sad and moving about a lot of
industrial noise music. I find it emotional very emotional.
Separating off from conventional diktats of acceptability brings forth

a clandestinely felt freedom in the act of creation. Tapes are also away
from an assembly line form of production and due to the often hand-
made, idiosyncratic nature of their production become singular ava-
tars of folk art. Keenan again:
I think of Noise music as pop musics night-time ... [the cassette]

was looked down upon. And so youre able to get away with more
on cassette, cos cassettes werent really policed ... you could do it at
home, you could cut out any of the industry that was surrounding
music at this point ... It flew in the face of the assembly line view
of music. Each cassette began as folk art that were different every
single time.
This is an interesting point. Cultural sociologist Nick Prior states that

the DIY ethic so cherished by punk rockers is no longer an activist ide-
ology, but a systematic, structural condition of the production of music
itself (Prior, 2010, p. 404). In practical terms, facing a recording indus-
try in which a vast amount of money is only really spent on a minute
quantity of hugely popular mega-stars, the DIY model incorporating,
for example, savvy use of relatively cheap home recording equipment,
strategic employment of (small) label backing and exploiting music
streaming (e.g. Spotify) or downloading sites (e.g. Bandcamp) makes a
lot of sense. One may nowadays be much more liberated from the stric-
tures of the assembly line, and can engage in choices which lead music
to be disseminated in a myriad of formats including tape. In essence,
the oft-acknowledged impetus for punk has opened up possibilities for
many non-punk musicians.
Related to this, I raised the issue with Zully that I felt part of the
appeal of tapes was down to their niche nature and inaccessibility few
people have tape players anymore, and the obscurity may be attractive.
Zully disagreed with the idea that the difficulty in playing the format
(nowadays) is what lends it its appeal:
I dont think its the inaccessibility of the medium itself that draws
people to it. I think the medium is more of a conduit, its not an end
in itself ... its everything around the tape that gets people going ...
I get asked all the time: why tapes? And I dont ever have a good
46 Kieran Curran
answer, because theres no one good answer. Theres a constellation

of less good answers, that make you deal with it.
Adler welcomes the democratic engagement which the internet can

offer with transnational music scenes with refreshing candour, and
doesnt seek to mystify this process by which music is now dissemi-
nated: Its not exclusive anymore you can google my name and buy
it for six bucks. The necessity of somewhat elitist gate-keepers (aka
obscure misanthropes in record shops) to culture is less apparent, and
this seems a good thing. There is the additional necessity for DIY musi-
cians and labels to promote their endeavours through email lists, social
media, and disseminating online flyers as opposed to the physical etc.
For instance, Volcanic Tongue operates a successful, well-liked and
well-curated online shop, while Unpop has forged connections to other
indie pop scenes locally and internationally through networking via all
sorts of digital avenues. A laptop computer can serve as the means of
producing, distributing and promoting music (Toop, 2004). In addition,
the Good Press website serves to foster and grow their DIY, cross-media
endeavours photographic documentation is actively included online,
increasing the appeal of their work:
J: I feel like theres a lot of people that have worked with Good Press
online, where its gone from Yeah well stock books, and then you
find stuff out about their cultures. You can find a lot about it and get
interested in it.
M: Our online shop and our website is really key to us, Were keen
on it. When we set up the press we wanted to make sure there are
photographs of everything we do online. Theres nothing worse than
coming across a website where theres no pictures.
Yet, despite this, in most of my conversations, there was a desire amongst

those interested in cassettes to at least partially disengage from the
processes of ever-expanding, ever-present internet communication and
exchanges of music. In a context where much of a persons work is
conducted at a computer, this renunciation or resistance is at least
meaningful. David Keenan asserted in our conversation: I am defi-
nitely pre-internet. Unpop only distributes mixtapes to the first few
people who turn up to the night. Stuart Arnott only puts up short clips
of Total Vermins music to be heard on their website to hear the whole
thing, you need to buy it at a gig or pay up through Paypal; all of these
gestures seek to interrupt the contemporary sense of instantaneous
On Tape 47
access to anything. Stuart is attracted to the idea of tape inaccessibility.

Additionally, there is a specifically political dimension to this, over
intellectual property and ethics:
I upload clips of the tapes to SoundCloud, but Id really like to not

do that ... there are political reasons why I choose to do that ...
No matter where you host it, somebody is making money from it.
Even if you get the most ethical host possible for your files, are you
happy for them to take your money and spend it? ... Essentially,
somebody is still making money off my work, and the artists
work. And you lose control of the dissemination of it ... theres
nothing to stop someone downloading my work and re-uploading
it somewhere else.
The sinister elements of file sharing and distribution is also something

Arnott is cognisant of (the area is clearly ripe for intensive monetary
exploitation, i.e. in the notable, recent case of Megaupload mogul
Kim Dotcoms ostentatious, gangster-esque wealth). Sites of dubi-
ous legality can often be tied in with odious industries of a different
nature:
If someone uploads it to a file sharing site, and that site makes most
of their money from advertising pornography. If someone visits that
site to download my work, then the people who are profiting from
that are pornographers.
Tapes, unlike CD-Rs, resist an easy transfer to digital formats, and

thus can exist (to a degree) outwith the darker recesses of the internet.
The paralysing nature of near-infinite choice also plays a role
Ali Robertson called attention to this even in his physical music
collection:
Ive got thousands of CDs and tapes and records, and Im thinking
I dont know what to put on. Im living in a library here. And its a
sense of too much choice and the internet is just too much choice
isnt it? I cannae deal with the overload I quite like getting things
at a slow pace, receiving things.
Robertson also identified the importance of slower exposure to culture

as a means of attempting to wholly absorb music and ideas speed of
life being one of the core experiences of late capitalism (Noys, 2014).
48 Kieran Curran
In referring to the significance of the underground magazine Bananash

on the development of his musical tastes:
Id read about it, obsess about it, 3 years later I would find one thing ...
and just devote all my time to this one thing for ages, and really get
to know it. Whereas now I meet people who are like *beep* I know
it, *beep* give me something else.
However, in conversation, Ali doesnt suggest that more omnivorous and

rapid consumers of music have lost the ability to assimilate music it
is more an example of a different way of listening. By contrast, David
Keenans extolling of the virtues of the quest to find new music and culture
feels a sort of jeremiad in miniature but an intensely compelling one:
Part of the fun thing about cassettes was the effort you had to put in
to put together knowledge it was initiatory (Keenans emphasis) on
a genuine level. You had to write away to these unknown addresses,
you had to order through catalogues Every discovery was a mas-
sive thrill; it was a massive commitment ... it was life-changing.
Googling something and reading a wikipedia entry does not make
you an expert, and has no initiatory effect whatsoever.
There was also a bizarre partiality at work in the process of seeking

out tapes in the past. Rather than encountering music which can be
quickly if perfunctorily, in Keenans view learned about online in
a few minutes, bootleg tapes were for many years a crucial medium for
hearing albums in advance of their official release, as well as live perfor-
mances which would have otherwise not been circulated. Ali Robertson
relates the experience of finding an advance copy of In Utero by Nirvana:
I remember going to Dunfermline10 and buying bootleg tapes of the

songs that were going to be on In Utero but they would get the song
titles wrong: Serve the Servants became Suss a Sundown.
In contrast to referencing the vast collective consciousness of the web,

experiences like Alis point back to an era where misinformation and
mistakes were part and parcel of encountering new music; thus, the
correct title is brilliantly warped into a sort of absurd, Scottish neolo-
gistic phrase. In some ways, these sorts of mistakes signpost interesting
misinterpretations and their attendant possibilities, rather than positing
a perspective of dry, fact-mongering rationality.
On Tape 49
Vinyls Cheaper (and more Democratic) Cousin
Cost has been and continues to be a key factor in the appeal of

tapes. Paul Etherington delineated this well, in terms of the dichotomy
between cassette and vinyl consumption:
I think theres an element of elitism with vinyl ... vinyls quite a

privileged medium, where you need a big chunky record player to
play it on, the equipment is more unwieldy ... The cassette has been
maligned so much, and the record purist will be down on it because
they can buy the vinyl, theyve got the choice they have 20 quid
for a new record, and the space to store it ... The cassette has been
the entry-level that gets people listening to music. Yes, vinyl is better
quality. But cassettes are something that you can cheaply own and
play without all these other barriers to entry ... the vinyl thing is very
much a purist thing.
Pauls remarks point to an element of economic and cultural capital dis-

tinction of the vinyl collector versus the tape collector money, storage
space and more specific technological know-how act to remove certain
players from the game. Paul identified perhaps a global, transnational
aspect to the cassettes appeal Awesome Tapes from Africa is an exam-
ple of this, as well as the vibrant consumption of tapes in Syria, India
and Malaysia (amongst other nations): Theres a universality to the
cassette its a worldwide phenomenon ... people dont care about the
sound quality they just love the songs and they want to hear them.
Love of the song over what is perceived to be normative standards of
fidelity suggest an unlikely connection between the indie pop sphere
and non-Western musics.
Jess from Good Press suggested that simple economic logic would
continue to contribute to a demand for tapes:
Youre always going to get bands putting out tape, because of the
simple fact that putting out your own record is way too expensive,
putting out fifty tapes is not.
This sentiment was echoed across all of the interviews for this piece.
Soft Powers attachment to the tape format has, as earlier stated, an aes-
thetic and a romantic dimension to it. But it is also definitely pragmatic,
due to the relatively cheap production costs in comparison to vinyl,
especially on limited runs and thus more profitable for the bands
50 Kieran Curran
and label. Based on his experience of making mixtapes when younger,

Graeme stated that:
I had a really good technical understanding of tapes, so we kind of

held on to that. You can actually manufacture them for less than a
quid [and] if you can retail them for two or three pounds, you
can maybe make about 100 pounds on a tape release. But the chasm
between that and vinyl ... The reason 7 inches are not popular right
now, is that to get a vinyl out youll be spending anything from
850 and 1200; that depends whether you do three hundred or five
hundred and another colour and that. Thats why we did five tape
releases in a row to try and make some money to bridge that gap.
Tapes thus point to a sense of sustainability in an economic sense they

are, as Ali Robertson put it relatively ethical as a physical medium for
music.11 Some of Soft Powers bands have experienced a sense of upward
mobility in the indie pop context after early releases on the label,
The Spook School and September Girls are now releasing professionally
pressed CD and vinyl records on a bigger independent label, Londons
Fortuna Pop. There is a freedom associated with groups operating out-
side of a major label context; bands do not necessarily move up or down
in a hierarchical context, but sideways. Basically, this could be said to be
down to love over money; or put another way those who are accorded
the higher fulfilment of the psychic wage of an artist are thus less
materially compensated with actual wages. Zully Adler raised this point
in relation to favourite bands of his within the American underground
their working lives are embedded with a degree of free agency:
I dont want to sound utopian here ... but their musical project is one
that isnt tethered directly to the imperatives of making money. There
are things they want to do and there are different ways they want to do
it. Sometimes they can cash in a little bit, and sometimes they wont
whether the timings not right, and whether they just dont feel like it.
A perceived degree of casualness imbued the bands that wanted to

release their work with Goaty Tapes, as well as an absence of auxiliary
label staff getting in the way a situation which Adler found liberating,
enabling design experiments to take hold:
I came to tapes from a print-making background, and from loving

music ... making the covers for tapes was always really fun for me.
On Tape 51
And I would experiment with different print methods, and making

weird designs. And because everybody had such a casual attitude
about the enterprise, I had complete creative freedom. I dont have
to put the name of the band on the spine if it doesnt suit me that
night, and people kind of vibe with it.
None of the people (apart from David Keenan) I spoke to who work with
tapes and work in what you could broadly term the music industries
do so for their living wage all have other day jobs. Adam Todd is a full-
time student as well as a musician he also performs stand-up comedy.
Adam Neil works in a bar, as well as promoting Unpop; Ali Robertson
was a long-term member of staff at the now-defunct Edinburgh record
shop Avalanche. Thus, amateur pragmatism is a core characteristic
of tapes appeal tapes are relatively popular for Arnott, they sell.
Robertsons goal is always to break even, after having had negative
experiences of losing heavy amounts of money by self-financing tours to
the US. There is also the option of seeking state subsidy, even in times of
apparent widespread austerity. However, this brings about its own prob-
lems. As Robertson identifies, management speak does not necessarily
come fluently to artists:
Were trying to do a tour in the States ... So were looking into what
sorts of funding are available. And you know, its all about Career
Development. The language used is always about a return on your
investment, and its impact on your career. Well, its not really a
career ... What return do you expect on this? Smiles from the
audience, hopefully.
Andrew Ross refers to this as part of a relatively recent, specific

commodification/marketisation of the arts, with work in the newly
coined creative industries bound up with neoliberal values of the
go-getting entrepreneur:
Leave your safety gear at the door; only the most spunky, agile, and
dauntless will prevail. This narrative is little more than an updated
version of social Darwinism, but when phrased seductively, it is
sufficiently appealing to those who are up for the game (Ross, 2009,
p. 45).
Precarious conditions underline this reconception of art as a driver of

GDP and gentrification, whilst often failing to ensure a modicum of
52 Kieran Curran
living standards for practitioners. It frees artists from the rigidity of the
division of labour In a communist society, there are no painters but
at most people who engage in painting among other activities (Marx
and Engels, 1973, p. 71) yet, bleakly minus the egalitarian organisa-
tion of society, and added market competition.
Conclusion
There is a certain romance to tapes they are finite, as human beings

are, and like us are material entities. They soundtrack memories,
embodied in an object, and even in compiling mixes are examples of
music-making in the Cageian sense of the organisation. Through trad-
ing and the economic exchange, they have historically brought people
together and continue to do so. The people I spoke with in Glasgow
and Edinburgh alike spoke of the value of the isolated moment in terms
of mixtape making, songwriting, determining the order and sequence
of a cassette, the pleasure of experimenting with artwork; all actions
which form part of a constellation (to borrow Zullys term) of reasons
to find use value in tapes. David Toops reflections on his early forays
into compiling mixes of work from the BBC sound archives in the 1970s
have some resonance here:
Working from a position of no power, no influence, no money, no

support, working with abject means, this accumulation of extraor-
dinary sound and personal experiment used cassettes to build ways
of unlearning and resounding, reaching out to a new listening
world.
Though by no means now technologically limited to tape, the percep-

tion of limited (or no) means is one which still binds together many
of those interested in tape on a grassroots level. And the concept of
personal experiment even if not necessarily related to a perceived
avant-garde project obviously still holds.
Yet in its encapsulation of the wilfulness inherent in the idea of
embracing cassette as a medium for music release in the early part of the
21st century I thought Id conclude with a joke from Ali Robertson on
the residual appeal of the form:
The reason cassettes are here? People who listen to noise and experi-
mental music are the contrariest fuckers out there. Who else would
listen to this shit?
On Tape 53
Notes
1. The title On Tape references the eponymous cult indie pop hit of 1988 by
The Pooh Sticks.
2. Do-It-Yourself is a term bound up with perceived independence and
self-sufficiency within cultural production, and often has connotations
of authenticity and opposition to the mainstream. This is perhaps surpris-
ing, given the terms parallel, non-musical history as the British synonym
of home improvement. Two key philosophical implications inhere in the
concept. On the one hand, it can serve to propagate the image of an isolated,
neoliberal subject toiling at home in isolation whilst dreaming of making it
big due to her individual effort (or exceptionalism) work all day and make
your magnum opus at night. Yet, contrastingly, there are other, more uto-
pian connotations of active local and trans-global collaboration and creative
freedom DIY culture has always promoted the maxims of anti-elitism
and, with new technology, they are truer than ever (Spencer, 2008, p. 332).
Alas, this does not mean they are owed a living (paraphrasing Crass), and
practitioners of this milieu often enjoy scant remuneration.
3. The commercial high-water mark of the cassette is way back in 1988
(1.4 billion units sold), reminding us of the relatively recent period of its
market dominance.
4. To clarify, a myriad of devices (essentially modelled on the Walkmans tem-
plate) by a vast array of different electronics companies reinforced and
proliferated this medium of personalised listening.
5. Interestingly, for a brief period before the explosion in digital downloading,
sales of cassette were larger than sales of vinyl.
6. Ali is in his mid-30s.
7. Soft Power tape releases are often accompanied by an MP3 download code,
allowing for a listening space to be constructed digitally, whilst the cassette
can function purely as an ornament.
8. Memorably referenced by the hip-hop artist Nas on his classic 1994 LP
Illmatic: Never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes. Related to this,
a professor of music I spoke to about the format pointed out that the key
technology [for tapes] was actually the pencil you inserted in a tapes hole
to turn loose tapes back to order.
9. In the often oppositional positioning of Edinburgh vs Glasgow within
everyday Scottish culture, the sedateness of Edinburghs more middle class
music scene is juxtaposed with Glasgows more edgy, vibrant expressive
world. As Ali Robertson commented in our interview: we live in Tartan
Disneyland right here ... in Glasgow, because they dont attract as many
tourists, they dont have to market themselves as shortbread city. On this
note, it seems fitting to state that Zully and I conducted this conversation
sitting in a dingy doorway on a rainy autumns evening on Renfield Lane
sandwiched between two key venues in Glasgows DIY music scene (Stereo
and The Old Hairdressers, respectively).
10. A medium-sized town in Fife (north of the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh),
nowadays acting as a sort of commuter belt area for the city of Edinburgh;
has produced notable pop bands such as Big Country in the past, and
Miracle Strip in the present.
54 Kieran Curran
11. Music sociologist Kyle Devine has written fascinatingly on the ethical impli-
cations of forms of musical dissemination on the environment in a forth-
coming article for Popular Music entitled Decomposed A Political Ecology
of Music.
Bibliography
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Popular Avant-garde. Popular Music, 31:3.
Benjamin, W. (2000) Illuminations. London: Verso.
Calder Williams, E. (2011) Combined and Uneven Apocalypse. London: Zero Books.
Chambers, I. (1990) A Miniature History of the Walkman. New Formations: A Journal
of Culture/Theory/Politics, No. 11, pp. 14.
Devine, K. (2015) Decomposed A Political Ecology of Music. Popular Music.
Forthcoming.
Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts of my Past. London: Zero Books.
Jameson, F. (1990) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London:
Verso Books.
Long, J. (2013) Why Weve Created Cassette Store Day and Why Its Not Just
Hipster Nonsense. NM. Available at: http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/
why-weve-created-cassette-store-day-and-why-its-not-just-hipster-nonsense
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1973) On Literature and Art. L. Baxandall and S. Morawski
(Editors). St Louis/Milwaukee: Telos Press.
McGuigan, J. (2009) Cool Capitalism. London: Pluto.
Michaels, S. (2013) Inaugural International Cassette Store Day Announced for
September. The Guardian. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/
jul/16/international-cassette-store-day-announced-september-2013
Noys, B. (2014) Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism. London: Zero
Books.
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Technology, and the Fate of Cultural Production. In L. Grindstaff, J. R. Hall and
L. Ming-Cheng (eds.), The Handbook of Cultural Sociology, 398407. London:
Routledge.
Reynolds, S. (2010) Retromania. London: Faber & Faber.
Ross, A. (2009) Nice Work if You Can Get It. New York: NYU Press.
Spencer, A. (2008) DIY The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. London: Marion Boyars.
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Toop, D. (2014) Tape Manipulation The Blank Cassette as Aural Dreamcatcher.
The Wire, Issue 363.
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Winston, B. (1998) Media, Technology and Society A History: From the Telegraph to
the Internet. London: Routledge.
3
Radio in Transit: Satellite
Technology, Cars, and the
Evolution of Musical Genres
Jeffrey Roessner
In George Lucass classic 1973 film American Grafti, a major plotline

involves a recent high-school graduate, Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), on a quest
to locate an attractive blond woman (Suzanne Somers) he has only
glimpsed, in passing, in her ethereal white T-bird. Representing escape
from the impending pressures of adulthood, career, and responsibility,
the woman can only be reached, he ultimately decides, through that
signal beacon of youthful fantasy: the radio. Indeed, radio saturates this
film in its celebration of 1950s cruising culture, with every nomadic
teen in an automobile tuned to the same station, listening to the same
deejay (Wolfman Jack) spin the soundtrack to their late adolescence.
Its not surprising, then, that Curt decides to seek salvation at the radio
station itself, where he can have his personal request for the woman
beamed through the air. In this narrative arc, American Grafti weds desire
and technology, uniting the wish for transcendence with the thrill of
early rock n roll. In so doing, it establishes radio as a communal force
that bonds an irresolute generation, with the deejay as savant, hidden
in his lair, conjuring dreams for a subterranean, mobile culture that
primarily exists at night, in a car, at the fringes of the adult world.
That potent mythology of a radio-equipped automobile as a vehicle
for deliverance still grips the contemporary cultural imagination
though technology has significantly changed listening practices. Just as
the AM Top 40 format of the 1950s ultimately stagnated and gave way
to free-form FM in the mid-60s, so today the hyper-commercialized,
demographic-driven FM platform itself is under assault by newer modes
of delivery. Satellite radio and online streaming services provide attractive
alternatives to the restricted playlists and narrow-casting of over-the-air
radio. To be sure, FM still reaches a vast audience. But satellite radio in
particular in the form of SiriusXM has carved out its market share
55
56 Jeffrey Roessner
by promising a sense of freedom and spontaneity to listeners. Offering

expanded playlists that challenge rigid boundaries of genre and format,
satellite radio downplays musical subgenres in favor of a proliferation of
micro-genres, signaling an important change in the way audiences are
constructed and served. And perhaps most important, satellite boasts
a human presence with the return of the deejay spinning songs and
providing context for whats played. Such tactics at once evoke and
commodify nostalgia for earlier radio practices, even as they build new
audiences. Ultimately, it is in the attempt to recover a 1960s aesthetic
of audio serendipity that satellite radio recuperates the automobile as
a vital listening space and sells the sounds of freedom, power, and
independence.
***
Contemporary listening spaces are generally premised on the fans abil-
ity to define his or her own playlists for private enjoyment. From online
services such as Spotify to the ultra-portable MP3 player, for example,
listeners now choose what they want to hear, when they want to hear it,
with technology individualizing the audio experience and breaking down
most spatial constraints. This is a privatized contemporary experience:
ultra-portability and the ubiquitous white earbuds or more recently,
the bulkier, 1970s-throwback cans that attempt both to mark a rejec-
tion of Apples iPod and to signal another level of consumer indulgence,
with the priciest headphones easily costing hundreds of dollars.
Regardless of the style or price of headphones, though, the delivery
system ensures sonic isolation. Seemingly no locale is an inappropriate
listening space while youre consuming your music privately: walking
on the street, riding the bus, lounging in a cafe, or even dining.
Given this contemporary context, the car may seem a ridiculously
antiquated vehicle in which to deliver music. The automobile is bulky
and at least a semi-public space if youre playing the radio with the
windows down or sharing the car with other passengers (Bull, 2003,
p. 367). And with radio, theres always the sense that no matter how
alone you feel, there are others out there tuned in, partaking of the
same auditory communion. How different that experience is from what
is offered by the slim, ever-shrinking and highly portable MP3 player or
smart phone. With the move toward privatizing even the most public
of spaces, it is no surprise that automobile makers now boast multiple
ways of playing a personal music collection in the car. If you want to
ditch your clunky CDs and their perennially lost and broken cases,
youve got plenty of options: from plug-and-play technology for your
Radio in Transit 57
iPod to Bluetooth connectivity for your phone, you never have to be

without a vast amount of your music even on the road.
Within the context of the rush toward personalization, over-the-air
radio although it remains the dominant mode of music delivery in
automobiles has shown signs of slipping. A 2013 survey by Arbitron
and Edison Research revealed that AM/FM radio was used Almost All of
the Time or Most of the Time by 58 percent of listeners, while the CD
player claimed 15 percent, the iPod/MP3 player 11 percent, and Satellite
Radio 10 percent (Palenchar, 2013).1 So the AM/FM hegemony contin-
ues, but perhaps only for a time: the erosion of its audience is clear.
A full 21 percent of automobile listeners are predominantly using
devices that did not exist before the turn of the century, and their num-
bers continue to grow: regarding online listening in general, no matter
the location, the percentage of users for one month in 2013 hit 45 per-
cent in the latest survey, or an estimated 120 million Americans. Thats
up from the previous years 39 percent, 2009s 27 percent, and 2003s
17 percent (Palenchar, 2013).2 The ultimate consequences of new
technology for listening are, of course, subject to debate (Calem, 2013).
How diminished will AM/FM be? Can satellite survive the onslaught
by streaming services scrambling for a spot aboard the infotainment
centers of newer automobiles? Will monolithic corporations like Clear
Channel maintain a presence by successfully streaming over-the-air
content? Though such questions hang over the future of the industry,
whats happening now is evident: the rise of alternative delivery sys-
tems represents a direct threat to over-the-air radio, as those stations
have been rendered artistically impotent by slick formats, corporate
monopolization, and rigid, demographically defined playlists.3
With these consumer trends in mind, we can read the history of satel-
lite radio, in its broadcast practices and marketing, as an alternative both
to traditional AM/FM programming and to streaming services such as
Spotify and Pandora. Emerging in the early 2000s, and aimed squarely
at audiences in the United States, satellite radio exploited emerging digi-
tal technology to reach listeners seeking more diverse audio choices in
their cars (Parker, 2008).4 Technology aside, the opportunity for a satel-
lite radio market arose in large part from the 1996 Telecommunications
Act, which loosened regulations on how many over-the-air stations a
company could own in a market. While previously a company could own
no more than forty stations nationwide, and no more than two FM and
two AM stations in a given market, the 1996 Act removed the national
restriction and allowed ownership of eight stations in a larger market,
and between five and seven in a smaller one (Polgreen, 1999, p. 9).
58 Jeffrey Roessner
By 1999, the law had resulted in dramatic changes: Of the 4992 sta-
tions in the 268 ranked markets almost half were controlled by a
superduopoly, that is, they [were] owned by a company that [had]
three or more stations in the market (Polgreen, 1999, p. 9). The result
of such consolidated ownership was a staggering decrease in radio diver-
sity. By the early 2000s, for example, radio giant Clear Channel had
acquired more than 1,200 stations in the United States, which took in
more than $3 billion, or 20% of the industry dollar volume, in 2001
(Garofalo, 2007, p. 14). Noting that radio has always had to balance
commercial interests with audience desires, Lydia Polgreen argues that,
nonetheless, it used to be the case that if listeners didnt like what they
heard on a station, if it was monotonous and repetitive, they could tune
away. Now there is just less choice out there (1999, p. 10). In fact, that
very lack of choice set the stage for the birth of satellite radio, predicated
on delivering more options than could be found on the increasingly
squeezed bandwidth and playlists of over-the-air stations run by media
conglomerates.
Initially satellite radio services were operated by two companies on two
competing systems: Sirus and XM receivers. Despite various attempts to
differentiate themselves, and in the context of serious fiscal challenges,
both systems functioned as largely commercial-free subscription ser-
vices in opposition to over-the-air radio. Merging into one company in
2008, SiriusXM in its current iteration now must also distinguish itself
from the increasing competition of online services striving to generate
ever-more-personalized playlists from vast catalogs of music (Bruno and
Tucker, 2008). From its inception, then, satellite radio has been branded
and marketed against the backdrop of other delivery platforms. Indeed,
such pressures for market share illuminate the approach satellite has
taken to everything from genre and format construction to audience
identification and presenting, or deejaying, itself.
Given the rapid evolution of contemporary listening habits, satel-
lite radio makes a major bid for subscribers by exposing the fact that
over-the-air radio, with its constricted playlists, might not reflect the
identities of some listeners. As David Hendy (2000) notes, If it is true that
through radio we hear what we are, it is also true that to some extent we
are what we hear (p. 214). He goes on to suggest the ways that radio may
exaggerate or even distort certain tastes, or notions of identity, rather
than simply reflecting them (p. 215). The situation leaves listeners
with several options: agree that the identity offered by a station rep-
resents them (I only listen to Froggy 99.7), channel surf to maintain
the sense of autonomy (No single station can capture me), or seek an
Radio in Transit 59
alternate technology for delivering music. In a recent essay, Eric Weisbard

(2014) argues against those who would unfairly malign the narrowness
of over-the-air formats. He suggests that because of flexibility and inno-
vation over time, The format system has provided a stable means for
groups left on the margins of public discourse ... to sing and feel things
together (25). Consequently, to disparage radio formatting is not to
disparage a style of music, but the popular audience that a format con-
structs. Or put another way, complaining about radio format is actually a
thinly disguised complaint about undiscriminating listeners. Weisbard is
surely correct to point out the flexible and genre-crossing nature of many
radio formats and their complex, evolving appeal; however, his argument
doesnt explain the steady growth of online and satellite listening. Clearly,
a significant portion of listeners are indicating that over-the-air radio does
not speak adequately to their identities. Moreover, when we consider the
number of genres and formats that are simply unavailable on commercial
radio, we must question how many marginalized groups are being served.
Through the sheer volume of channels, satellite radio complicates
standard genre and format equations used by FM to construct audiences.5
The Sirius All Access package for listening in your car currently offers 74
channels classified as music divided into nine broad categories.6 The
list of music genres, followed by the number of channels featuring each,
includes: Rock (29), Pop (12), Jazz/Standards (8), Country (7), Dance/
Electronica (6), R&B (4), Hip-Hop (3), Christian (3), and Classical (2).
(See Figure 3.1.)
In addition, multiple channels feature music but are not listed under
that category: a host of channels labeled More, Talk & Entertainment,
and Latino represent music stations aimed at particular listening audi-
ences defined by national or ethnic identity (Canadian and Latino)
or by age (Kids). Satellite radio complicates the genre equation here
through its system of classification, indicating that it is more important
that you are Canadian, say, than that you like alternative music (the
Canadian indie rock channel Iceberg is listed under More), just as it is
crucial to keep adults from accidentally winding their way to the Disney
channel in search of real rather than kids music (the Disney channel
is presented as Talk and Entertainment). We might note the piquant
irony of kids music being called entertainment, as opposed to ... what,
the serious rock listened to by parents? The categorization here replicates
a classic generational divide, recalling the dismissal of rock and roll itself
as noise: still today, it seems, this kid-stuff isnt worth calling music.7
The biggest complication to genre from satellite radio, however, comes
from the sheer volume of channels classified under various headings.
60 Jeffrey Roessner
Classical (2)
Christian (3) 3%
4%
Hip-Hop (3)
4%
R&B (4)
5%
Dance/Electronica (6)
8%
Rock (29)
39%
Country (7)
10%
Jazz/Standards (8)
11%
Pop (12)
16%
Figure 3.1 SiriusXM Channels by Genre

Data source: SiriusXM.com.
With over twice as many stations as its nearest competitor, rock

claims by far the largest share of broadcast space. Such domination of
the soundscape is no surprise given rocks ubiquity.8 But in this con-
text, the umbrella genres may be deployed less to find what we do like
than to quickly identify what we dont want. You might not enjoy all
of the stations presented in the name of rock, but at certain times you
surely know that you dont want to hear jazz, classical, or God for-
bid Christian. From the other point of view, very little seems to hold
the rock channels together under any positive stylistic definition of
the genre. If listeners gravitate toward the Jam or The Coffeehouse
channels, are they likely to tune in to Elvis Radio, 1st Wave, or
Liquid Metal? Not very often, one supposes. The listings under rock
demonstrate the unstable and contradictory nature both of individual
genres and of the concept of genre as a whole. The motley assortment
of styles and audiences are so distinct that the broad generic category
becomes relatively useless in defining style or taste.
Radio in Transit 61
The 29 satellite rock channels, for example, do not function as sub-genres

with a common root. It would be difficult to create a hierarchized history
of rock that would show these niche genres developing out of their
common parent in any logical or rational way. Such complication partly
has to do with the ever-expanding definition of rock, which has come
to mean essentially almost any variety of contemporary popular music
except country, rap, or in some cases depending on how you slice it
pop. In this context, it may be more helpful to think of many of the
satellite channels as representing micro-genres that have a rhizomatic
relationship to broader, and deceptively stable, genre categories such as
jazz, country, or rock. In their work A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari (1987) define the rhizome in contrast to the root and
branches ideation of history, which implies linear historical develop-
ment that can be traced back to an original root and logically assembled
into a coherent evolutionary pattern (p. 5). In contrast, the rhizome
botanically spreads horizontally underground from nodes, sending
out shoots and forming root systems for entirely new plants. The rhi-
zome thus evokes multiplicity, an excess that spills over boundaries and
disrupts linear, causal history, invoking many points of entry and exit
from the system and undermining any notion of an originary moment.9
Deleuze and Guattari specifically link the rhizome to music, which they
argue has always sent out lines of flight, like so many transformational
multiplicities, even overturning the very codes that structure or arbo-
rify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and prolif-
erations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome (pp. 1112). A new history
of music in this age of technology must confront these opposing
tendencies: the forces that would arborify styles, or domesticate and
stabilize them, and the explosion of styles and labeling that overturns
those essentialized codes.
Offering listeners a multiplicity of choices, satellite radio invokes a rhi-
zomatic model of musical propagation, one represented in far more over-
whelming detail on the internet. For example, in his data-visualization
of popular music at EveryNoise.com, engineer and data alchemist
Glenn McDonald has employed an algorithm to identify 1306 genres of
popular music (Fitzpatrick, 2014; McDonald, n.d.). McDonald presents
these genres in a dizzying scatter-plot of titles arrayed across the screen,
with no apparent causal relationship. Rather than being organized
around branch-lines that suggest clear relationships and an evolution-
ary pattern, the micro-genres (from Neue Deutsche Harte and Liquid
Funk to Dirty Texas Rap) cluster around stylistic tendencies roughly
oriented toward quadrants of the viewing screen. And the micro-genres
62 Jeffrey Roessner
represented cut across seemingly sensible boundaries: for example, if

you follow the pattern to the British Invasion page, you are confronted
with a visualization that includes many American bands illustrating
Deleuze and Guattaris contention that any point of a rhizome can be
connected to anything other, and must be (p. 7). The proliferation of cat-
egories on satellite radio and in the online environment work in tandem
here to redeploy genre categories in a media-saturated culture.10
As for satellite radio in particular, it is not just that it presents fuzzy
or questionable genre and format boundaries, but that it offers multi-
ple, competing definitions of music categories simultaneously. Indeed,
the sheer number of channels allows SiriusXM to exploit overlapping
categories with little concern for the coherence of its approach to genre
or format.11 The listeners affiliative identity with a channel might be
based on any number of different, and differently constructed, appeals.
Dialing across the digital spectrum, we see that categories by style of
music certainly do exist. But so do categories based on age, ethnicity,
nationality, location, and era (the time-period in which the music was
released). Six of the first ten channels on the SiriusXM dial walk us logi-
cally up the decades: the 50s on 5, the 60s on 6, etc. The Disney channel
is aimed at children, the Latino stations at an ethnic population, and
New Wave at an audience with a fondness for a particular historical
period (the 1980s) of popular music. Not only do we ostensibly have
music for all people, but all kinds of genres and formats for all kinds of peo-
ple.12 To discern what you want to listen to requires negotiation of con-
flicting constructions of self that are also, of course, subject to change:
this afternoon, are you looking for music with a particular mood, a
particular sense of national or ethnic character, or do you want to return
nostalgically to a time in your life or, indeed, to an imaginary time
before you were born? The listener decides how to register his or her
identity through navigating the multitude of genres, formats, and shows.
As listeners personalize their music consumption, even in their cars,
it is telling that one of the most compelling iPod functions is shuffle
play. Even when enjoying our own collection of MP3s, we still seem
to crave the spontaneity and surprise that come from hearing a long-
neglected album track or the random digital juxtaposition of distinct
bands and genres. Similarly, online services Pandora and Spotify allow
users to construct playlists based on song preferences or subscribe to
the playlists put together by others or by computer algorithm. Their
success lies in giving fans easy access to new music that they might not
have heard before but that nonetheless falls within a spectrum of taste
suggested by their listening habits. These services offer what we might
Radio in Transit 63
call controlled serendipity, or surprise that is not too surprising. The

object is to deliver music that fits a certain mood or preference without
exceeding certain defined parameters. While perhaps delivering unfa-
miliar artists or songs to the listener, the streaming services clearly aim
to avoid jarring contrasts that would call attention to themselves.
So how does satellite radio attempt to carve out its market as an answer
to the limitations of both over-the-air broadcasts and streaming services?
Along with the sheer number of channels, formats, and genres it deliv-
ers, satellite radio features a large and eclectic playlist. Little Stevens
Underground Garage, for example, was built on a selected playlist of
4,000 songs to illustrate the history of rock n roll (Pham, 2012). Such
depth of catalog allows for juxtapositions, both between and within
channels, that listeners would be hard-pressed to find on over-the-air
broadcasts. In a randomly selected one-hour period (December 15, 2014,
from 9:00 to 10:00 am), for example, the Underground Garage played
Bananarama, The Beatles, The Wolfmen, and Sweet.13 The variety is more
limited on channels featuring more restricted formats (e.g., the 80s on
8), of course, but many do consistently deliver surprising song and artist
choices. In that same hour, Deep Tracks offered selections by The Grateful
Dead, Queen, Genesis, and Ry Cooder; The Loft featured Jerry Lee Lewis,
Hall and Oates, and Rufus Wainwright; and even 1st Wave fairly limited
to its era stretched listeners ears a bit with a mlange of Devo, David
Bowie, and The Smiths. Reflecting on the depth of catalog that allows
for such playlists, Little Steven himself says he always thought that
the depository of our entire musical history will end up on SiriusXM
(Pham, 2012). That expansive approach helps deliver a sense of surprise
for listeners that is one of SiriusXMs main appeals.
If satellite radio competed simply on the sheer size of playlist, though,
that would not provide a competitive edge against streaming services.
So along with marketing its versatile approach to audiences and play-
lists, satellite radio exposes another weakness of other platforms: the
fate of presenters. Except for the yuck-a-minute morning shows featur-
ing multiple hosts, over-the-air radio generally has turned the deejay
into an endangered species. Describing this marginalization of tradi-
tional programmers and presenters, Hendy (2000) notes that a small
handful of radio staff now simply manage[s] the intake and repack-
aging of satellite-delivered syndicated material, and ensure[s] that the
various pre-recorded items are continually re-arranged and updated
in a predetermined pattern of spontaneity transmitted automatically,
with or without a presenter in the studio (p. 112). Within this rigid
format, spontaneity arrives in quotation marks because it has become
64 Jeffrey Roessner
a carefully contrived effect, essentially functioning as a simulacrum of

real surprise and the delight of hearing something unexpected. And of
course, deejays are entirely absent from streaming services.
Hendys observations are evidenced in the rise of Jack stations (and
subsequent offshoots and imitators such as Bob and Hank), which
to be fair can employ human or computer-driven playlists three or
four times the size of traditional stations (1200 versus 300400 songs)
(Davidovich and Silver, 2005). Their marketing angle is the supposedly
radical juxtaposition of songs and styles Bob stations, for example,
annoyingly repeat ads promising that Bob plays anything. The sta-
tions at once anthropomorphize their algorithm by giving it a suppos-
edly quirky personality with an average-Joe name, and, bizarrely, suggest
that their synthetic deejay has thus been freed to play anything.
What is the implication here? That a human deejay would present a
more constricted, more predictable playlist? In making such pseudo-
spontaneity its calling card, the Bob stations use a computer program
to very slightly exceed the rigid temporal, stylistic, and musical bounda-
ries of other pop music stations aimed at similar demographics and
then claim that the strategy makes them somehow radical. Only a
listener with the most inflexible notion of radio would find these sta-
tions which lean solely on hits and heavily on the 1980s surprising
(Davidovich and Silver, 2005). Yet marketers persist in their attempt to
convince listeners that they can somehow recover the serendipity of ear-
lier, free-format FM radio through technology, with no more messy issues
of the presenters taste interfering. In a sense, of course, this tactic pre-
cisely mirrors that employed by online streaming services, which employ
their proprietary formulas for individualizing music consumption.14
Amidst the variety of attempts to narrow-cast, satellite responds to
both FM and streaming music services through the welcome return of
the deejay. Whether you are tuning in to any one of the many shows
hosted by celebrity presenters, enjoying the philosophical and historical
musings of Little Steven or one of his hosts on the Underground Garage,
or enduring the patter of the jocks on Disney you can often find an
actual person spinning tunes and talking to you. A trip across the digi-
tal spectrum reveals shows by Tom Petty, Mojo Nixon, Bernie Taupin,
Bob Dylan, Cousin Brucie, and more, along with the regular spate of
non-celebrity hosts. And these hosts frequently distinguish themselves
through their level of personal engagement. Discussing Little Stevens
Underground Garage, the two-hour syndicated FM show from which
the Underground Garage channel emerged, Ann Johnson (2010) notes
the abundance of historical and musical details about the artists and
Radio in Transit 65
songs. In an average two-hour episode, Van Zandt offers over thirty min-
utes of commentary (p. 583). Featuring wry observations, jokes, and artful
selection of songs, the Tom Petty show Buried Treasures, in fact, became
so popular that it now has its own dedicated channel. Such develop-
ments suggest a return to the idea that a radio show has a distinctive
character and that you might be tempted to make time to listen. This
presenter-driven programming is also a revolt against the car radio as
background noise, there to provide a steady stream of fairly predict-
able sonic wallpaper for your life. The re-emergence of the deejay as
a distinctive character functions as part of satellites anti-commercial
aesthetic: not beholden to a single, restricted demographic profile and
the advertisers who want to reach it, SiriusXM has the luxury to offer
spontaneous talk by presenters.
Revitalizing the presenter, moving toward openness in format, and
destabilizing genre categories, satellite radio evokes a clear historical
echo. At its advent in the late 1950s, Top 40 AM radio aimed squarely
at the burgeoning teen pop market. By the mid-1960s, however, the
once-radical Top 40 format had worn itself thin, with its frenzied patter
by clock-obsessed deejays and relentless spinning of a narrow range of
hits (Douglas, 1999, p. 254). In that context, FM intervened with a radi-
cal alternative: deejays who were able to set their playlists, often full of
album tracks too long and too obscure for AM stations, and who could
spend air-time talking to listeners about mature subjects. In a sense,
as the counter-culture came of age, so did its taste for both music and
political/social commentary. While young teens still followed the manic
hijinks of Top 40 stations, their slightly older brothers and sisters were
awakening to a darker reality, involving issues of war, lack of civil rights,
and womens inequality (Fisher, 2007, pp. 1345). In this sense, FM deliv-
ered the soundtrack to the countercultural revolution and of course,
it didnt hurt that FM was far superior to AM in sound quality as well.
In contemporary culture, satellite radio hearkens back to that era of
revolution as it breaks with FM formatting. As in the 1960s, it is a new
mode of delivery this time in the form of satellite broadcast that has
allowed for radical shifts in radio practice. With the means to deliver
not just one channel but literally hundreds, SiriusXM has the ability to
multicast to reach relatively diverse audiences. In this sense the goal of
satellite radio is diametrically opposed to commercial radio: rather than
trying to reach a narrowly defined audience with a single channel, try to
reach as many audiences as you can with as many channels as you can
broadcast. Replicating the great moment of freedom at the emergence
of FM in the 1960s, satellite radio thus promises an escape both from
66 Jeffrey Roessner
commerce and from the seemingly inflexible boundaries of over-the-air

radio. In part, then, along with its aura of innovation, SiriusXM grounds
its appeal in nostalgia for the lost values of freedom and serendipity
associated with radios past.
Such investment in nostalgia brings contradictions, of course. It is
true that satellite broadcast largely does away with what many consider
the most annoying feature of over-the-air radio: commercials. But listen-
ers have to pay for the privilege of expanding their music horizons
and for maintaining the illusion of anti-commercialism. In this respect,
SiriusXM has, paradoxically, commodified the anti-consumer aesthetic
that drove 1960s free-form FM. The fact that listeners have to pay for
something music on the radio that has traditionally been free is
concealed in automatic monthly payments, minimizing reminders that
you actually spend money to avoid advertising. The need to pay for the
service also means that the audience does have economic boundaries:
if SiriusXM doesnt run many ads, the company nonetheless has a clear
marketing strategy aimed at particular audiences. Given the playlists and
the price-tag, the satellite audience must include a large contingent of
affluent baby boomers willing to pay for the experience of commercial-
free radio that caters extensively to their tastes, whether it be for sports,
comedy, talk radio, or the many rock channels that focus on music from
their era. These listeners are slightly older, slightly wealthier consum-
ers on whom over-the-air stations dont necessarily focus anyway. The
musical side of satellite radio includes restrictions as well, as the micro-
genres and eclectic formats certainly arent without boundaries: aside
perhaps from the Latino channels, SiriusXM hardly offers anything
that we would call world music, for example. Finally, and perhaps most
problematic, satellite radio works in tandem with FM conglomerates
such as Clear Channel to decrease the presence of local culture on
the air. If the audience is national or global, whats lost is the sense of
addressing a local community, with its distinctive attractions, politics,
economy, and climate.15 Even operating within such contradictions
and constraints, however, satellite broadcasting has proved remarkably
successful, particularly in the automobile.
The listening space provided by the contemporary automobile, of
course, cannot be considered aside from its general technological evo-
lution. Simply as a means of personal transportation, todays car offers
an increasingly safe and predictable experience. The rear-view cameras,
airbags, automatic breaking sensors, and ultra-quiet interiors insulate
drivers not only from physical danger and general annoyances but also
from many of the sensations and pleasures traditionally associated with
Radio in Transit 67
motoring. This separation from the environment will likely find its
ultimate expression in self-driving automobiles, which given program-
ming to assess the risks of various roadway scenarios may ultimately
even threaten to take ethical decisions away from drivers (Lin, 2013). It
is within this context that listening and being entertained while driving
assume crucial roles, both for marketers and consumers.
Although many of the physical and psychological associations of driv-
ing itself such as mobility, freedom, adventure are being constricted,
these qualities are simultaneously being reconstituted as an aesthetic
experience of the interior space of the automobile.16 Karin Bijsterveld
(2010), for example, offers a compelling analysis of the cars sonic space,
engineered precisely to distinguish brands and convey specific emo-
tional resonance to consumers (p. 202). In its current design, she argues,
the automobile functions as a sanctuary from the assaults of the every-
day world and provides a personal acoustic cocoon: in so doing, the car
may provide a last bastion of privacy as it affords you control over
your acoustic environment (p. 191). And such auditory privacy and
control not only defines the interior space of the car, but also consti-
tutes an experience of personally possessed time for harried or bored
drivers/listeners (Bull, 2003, p. 365). For satellite radio subscribers, the
wide swath of channels undergirds this sense of power, since they get
to choose, fairly specifically, the type of programming and music that
serves their needs in the moment.
Still, along with recuperating a sense of control and privacy, satellite
radio simultaneously proffers a space of imaginative freedom and explo-
ration. While driving the car itself has become a more regimented and
controlled experience, the options for listening re-open possibilities for
discovery. Describing the appeal of satellite programming, deejay Jim
Ladd a refugee from over-the-air FM sings the praise of free form
presenting on SiriusXM: What was once a creative and rebellious art
form has become a boring, repetitive machine. Rock is supposed to be
fun. Its supposed to be unpredictable. And its supposed to be a little dan-
gerous. And SiriusXM is re-revolutionizing rock radio by giving me more
freedom than Ive ever had (Pham, 2012). Ladd here succinctly captures
the emotional charge packaged in a car equipped with satellite radio:
it is fun, unpredictable, and slightly dangerous, infused with a sense of
freedom and revolution. Such qualities emerge partly in SiriusXMs chal-
lenge to other platforms: the reinvention of genres and formats, the exten-
sive playlists, the deejays supplying context, humor, and deep passion for
the music these elements, and the emotional connections they invoke,
allow both the car and the radio to hearken back to a more radical past.
68 Jeffrey Roessner
At this historical moment, SiriusXM has staked its claim to an alter-

native idea of what radio could be. So far, it has been successful in
recruiting new subscribers and has begun aggressively maneuvering
into that other, older domain of radio: the home itself. But radio in all
its forms faces a murky future. Will a significant number of listeners
remain willing to pay for the satellite experience? How will satellite
radio fare as the technology for using streaming services in the car
becomes more common? How big is the audience that doesnt neces-
sary want to have its taste endlessly confirmed by algorithm-defined
playlists? Answers to those questions will only emerge as new listening
platforms and habits spread. For now, satellite is banking on its success
mixing deejays, deep playlists, and freer formatting. The consequence
of such innovative programming has been the birth of the hybrid
techno-automobile as a listening space. In its current configuration,
equipped with SiriusXm radio, the car not only conjures speed, power,
autonomy, and sex, but also the fortuitous joy of discovered music. By
wedding the cars promise of travel and freedom to a sonic landscape,
satellite radio sells both a nostalgic recovery of whats been heard
before and the promise of surprising new delights ahead, just a little
further down the road.
Notes
1. A more recent study of automobile listening puts the SiriusXM audience at
18 percent, versus 67 percent for broadcast radio (Hill, 2014).
2. A recent Edison Research and Triton Digital study further revealed that In
2014, 26% of mobile phone users have connected devices to a vehicle, either
physically or via Bluetooth, up from 21% in 2013 (Webster, 2014).
3. The most ominous sign for AM/FM broadcasters surely must be whats hap-
pening with the next generation of listeners. A recent Edison study based on
one-day audio diaries reports that teenagers aged 1317 spend on average
64 minutes per day listening to streaming audio programs, versus 54 minutes
per day on over-the-air or streaming AM/FM radio (Hill, 2014).
4. In 2014, the chief financial officer of SiriusXM, David Frear, ruled out expan-
sion to European or other world markets given the prohibitive start-up costs
as well as the lack of the larger, comparatively more homogenous culture of
the United States (Forrester, 2014).
5. For a thorough treatment of genre issues and an insightful survey of the
critical literature, see Fabian Holts Genres in Popular Music (2007).
6. The list reflects content on Siriusxm.com as of October 8, 2014. For the pur-
poses of this study, I have used SiriusXM radio and the All Access package.
Satellite broadcasts are also available on two other models of radio Sirius
and XM but the differences between the music offerings are slight. And
of course, other listening packages are available with fewer channels; how-
ever, I am interested in the categorization of the broadest number of music
channels, which the All Access package offers.
Radio in Transit 69
7. A further irony: the Party category, with eleven channels, exists only
online. One imagines thousands of house parties hosted by a whole under-
ground of urban, tech-savvy young people, with no cars, raving through
the night, listening to the classics, oldies, punk everything that has been
shoveled into this format.
8. See Taylor and Morins Pew study Forty Years after Woodstock, a Gentler
Generation Gap (2009), which reports that rock is the favorite genre of
every age group in the U.S. except those over 65.
9. As Deleuze and Guattari make clear, a fragmented system can nonetheless
appeal to a larger sense of an organic perhaps circular or spiral whole,
while a true multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determina-
tions, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without
the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore
increase in number as the multiplicity grows) (1987, p. 8).
10. Fabian Holt places these developments in a larger philosophical context
when he contends that The erosion of cultural hierarchies and the massive
increase in the circulation of cultural products have created new forms of
categorical complexity and given rise to critical reactions against the large
philosophical systems of Western modernity (2007, p. 6).
11. In Simon Friths discussion of genre function, he notes the competing and
sometimes contradictory work done by genre as employed by artists, record
companies, record stores, radio stations, music writers, and fans in other
words, those who are playing, selling, and listening to music (1996, pp.
889). In the case of satellite radio, we can see the complication of broad
genre distinctions as an attempt to serve those fans/audiences who were
unhappily affiliated with industry offerings. More cynically, we might see
satellite as largely catering to the tastes of older audiences (particularly
rockers) in whom the contemporary music scene has lost interest.
12. I dont want to suggest that such proliferation of categories is a new develop-
ment, but rather that technology has allowed it to happen in a novel way
for a broader spectrum of listeners. Frith, for example, notes how music pub-
lishers in the early 20th century employed multiple, sometimes non-musical
characteristics in defining an array of labels for types of songs (1996, p. 76).
13. This and all subsequent playlist data comes from dogstarradio.com, the
primary site for cataloging what gets played on satellite radio.
14. Pandora (n.d.) touts its Music Genome Project, the most sophisticated
taxonomy of musical information ever collected, in which every song is
coded for a host of qualities by live human beings. Does it really matter? This
classification system still aims to hit the same target as a digital analysis: a
playlist following a particular pattern of mood, tempo, emotional sonority,
instrumental style, etc. The premise of all such systems is ultimately con-
vergence how can musical data be sliced so thin that I hear more of what
I already know I like? An alternative approach, generally found left of the
dial, if at all, might raise the issue of divergence: how do I discover something
genuinely different, which exceeds the bounds of my declared tastes?
15. Bill McKibben presents this argument against the flattening effect of satellite
radio as opposed to the multitude of local cultures represented through
online radio broadcasts: Just like the Clear Channel stations, it [satellite]
surrenders the thing that makes radio so magical: connection to a commu-
nity (2007, p. 134).
70 Jeffrey Roessner
16. For a critical reading of this development, see Michael Bulls overview of
the theory that technological products of the culture industry replace the
subjects sense of the social, community or the sense of place (2003, p. 363).
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Fitzpatrick, R. (2014) From Charred Death to Deep Filthstep: The 1,264 Genres
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4
The Internet and the Death
of Jazz: Race, Improvisation,
and the Crisis of Community
Margret Grebowicz
In his landmark 1994 study Thinking in Jazz: The Innite Art of

Improvisation, Paul Berliner describes American jazz as a community
cutting across boundaries defined by age, class, vocation, and ethnic-
ity. This includes the core of the community, those players focused on
playing only jazz professionally, as well as more peripheral groups, like
professional musicians who play not only jazz but also other genres
professionally, semi-professional players with day jobs (weekend war-
riors), and jazz fans. It is their abiding love for the music that binds
this diverse population together (Berliner, 1994, p. 36). Twenty years
later, the jazz community can no longer be described in such unified
terms. Many contemporary musicians and fans are unified around the
idea that jazz-the-artform is dead. Perhaps not dead and buried, but
at least stuffed in the taxidermic sense, museified in a sort of jazz dio-
rama. No example illustrates this better than that of the International
Thelonious Monk Competition, held every year for a different instru-
ment. A running joke in the scene is that if Thelonious Monk were
alive today, he would stand no chance of winning the Monk piano
competition, because the music, which was once black, avant-garde
music like Monks, has become demographically white, aesthetically
white-washed, more subject than ever to commercial pressures, and
controlled by conservatories.
There is no question that jazz is in trouble, and the point of this
chapter is not to restate the obvious. The precise cause of that trou-
ble is difficult to isolate and even the exact shape of it is not so easy
to describe. Esperanza Spaldings Grammy for Best New Artist, for
instance, was for some a reason to celebrate, a sign that the public has
finally embraced jazz. For others, it meant merely that her music is in
fact commercial, and the awards have once again gone to the sellouts,
72
The Internet and the Death of Jazz 73
while the real jazz players and composers, the ones who challenge us
aesthetically, intellectually, and sometimes even politically, continue
to wallow in un-Grammied obscurity. For a good dose of the latter,
one need only to check in daily with the anonymous blogger who goes
by the name Jazz is the Worst, and whose dark, ironic tweets have
become a staple of jokes among jazz musicians on social media, like
#FightingForScraps and The average age of the Newport Jazz Fest
audience is deceased (JazzIsTheWorst, 2015). The author of the blog
is a jazz musician, judging by the amount of insider information, and
it is interesting to note that musicians love circulating these tweets and
blog entries. In the hands of the players themselves, the pronounce-
ment that jazz is in fact the worst has become something like a form
of resistance, precisely when the music itself has ceased to be resistant
enough.
Many deaths of jazz have been announced at the hands of the
Internet. Most famously, the Internet means the death of record labels.
Anyone can self-produce a record, which means the loss of the old meri-
tocratic weeding out mechanism that labels ostensibly provided. Jazz is
also dead because artists can no longer count on record sales for a size-
able portion of their income. This affects everyone, from bandleaders
to side musicians. Incomes are falling steadily, causing more and more
players to look for work teaching privately and trying to get university
positions, many of which take them away from urban areas, which are
the only places to gig. Heated debates about the deaths and rebirths
of jazz take place on Facebook, the very platform where musicians
announce their gigs. But technologies are themselves non-innocent.
They do not merely reflect these debates and conversations back to us,
but bring to the table their own, built-in imaginaries of community by
definition. Thus, as jazz musicians talk to each other about the scene,
the fact that they do it as a mode of belonging to social networks mat-
ters to the question of what is said. In what follows, I attempt to map
the effects of this on jazz with special attention to the online debates
about race in the contemporary scene. My working hypothesis: that
the modes of sociality created by the Internet shape what counts as
being-in-community today, which in turn affects the relational aspects
of improvisation. This chapter is not a critique of online jazz commu-
nities, but of the effects of Internet and social media more generally
on this particular form of music today, down to the playing itself. To
understand the gentrification of jazz1 we must look beyond economic
factors and the backdrop of American race politics, and more closely at
exactly how the Internet shapes social life.
74 Margret Grebowicz
Black American Music and Stuff White People Like
Social media conversations about jazz appear divisive and inflamma-

tory. But what counts as agreement and division becomes less obvi-
ous with a closer look. For example, rather than alienating people,
jazzistheworst.blogspot.com has engendered a sort of community
moment, all of us sharing a laugh at our own expense, a brief reprieve
from the alienation and frustration that otherwise marks the jazz
musicians daily experience. A few years ago, the YouTube video Jazz
Robots (Hundertmark, 2010) went jazz-viral, satirizing the common
(and exclusive) lingo jazz musicians continue to use. It was literally
a joke that only players could understand. Among the most notori-
ous attempts to stabilize jazz identity on the Internet is the ongoing
attempt to race the genre: is jazz today the music of black Americans
(as it was originally), white Americans (as the music school gradua-
tion stats seem to indicate), white Europeans (who famously provide
the best audiences and funding for jazz), or some happy postracial col-
lective of all of the above? Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
provide the stage for this controversy.
One notable example is the Nicholas Payton/Wynton Marsalis blog
debate about the relationship between the names jazz and black
American music (or #BAM as Payton calls it). Marsalis has been sort
of appointed by Ken Burns (and, some would argue, self-appointed) to
be the ambassador of jazz, but specifically of jazz understood as rooted
in the tradition. As artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, he
has consistently failed to represent the music as living and changing,
excluding jazz that departs in significant ways from his version of the
canon. He is famous and celebrated for this by the public at large, but
many jazz musicians blame him for the museification of the music
and thus for ever-smaller audiences and interest from young people.
The typical audience for a Jazz at Lincoln Center concert is elderly,
white, and wealthy a definite sign that jazz is dead, many would
argue. Nicholas Payton (2014), on the other hand, describes himself
as a black postmodern musician and refuses to use the word jazz
because of its racist, colonial history. From his website:
The #BAM movement created by Nicholas, states the revolutionary,

yet evident, idea that music of the Black American diaspora is more
similar than dissimilar. Black American Music speaks of his and all
music descending from the Black American experience, including
spirituals, gospel, blues, so-called jazz and soul. Hailed as The Savior
of Archaic Pop, Payton is rooted in tradition, yet isnt stuck there.
Both Marsalis and Payton hail from New Orleans and play the trum-
pet. At stake in the online disagreement between themis not only the
nature and future of jazz, but the nature and future of blackness and
the consumption of black culture by white audiences. And although
they remain in a sort of public dispute, many would claim that Payton
and Marsalis are not at all very different from each other, both carrying
on the authority of the black jazz trumpet player, a figure onto which
so many fantasies have been projected, and both in fact stuck in the
tradition. Jazz is the Worst (2014) writes that, like Miles Davis, Payton
has managed to alienate white audiences:
Historically, Miles Davis did a great job of alienating the audience by

refusing to acknowledge their very existence; playing with his back
to them. Today its a little harder to maintain that distance while
giving Jazz fans access to your life and opinions via social media. Id
like to praise Nicholas Payton for doing a fantastic job at alienating
the audience while maintaining an online presence with his blog. By
renaming Jazz into Black American Music, hes alienated a whop-
ping 85% of the audience; who are white. He also does this brilliantly
by accusing anyone and everyone of being racist, while maintaining
white people have never added anything through the entire course
of Music history. I know for this reason I cant wait for his upcoming
album Fuck white people to drop in late 2015.
But chasing after blackness has had the opposite effect, drawing white
audiences more powerfully than ever. On stuffwhitepeoplelike.com
(2008), for instance, we learn that white people like Black music that
Black people dont listen to anymore, the worst of which is Jazz, followed
by The Blues (deftly capitalized by the authors) and old school hip-hop.
Historically speaking, the music that white people have kept on life
support for the longest period of time is Jazz. Every few months,
a white person will put on some Jazz and pour themselves a glass
of wine or scotch and tell themselves how nice it is. Then they will
get bored and watch television or write emails to other white people
about how nice it was to listen to Jazz at home. Last night, I poured
myself a glass of Shiraz and put Charlie Parker on the Bose. It was
so relaxing, I wish I had a fireplace. Listing this activity as one of

your favorites is a sure fire way to make progress towards a romantic
relationship with a white person.
Then theres the issue of the players themselves. The future of jazz is
arguably bright white: todays young players are mainly white men
with music degrees. They leave relatively sheltered upper-middle-class
suburban childhoods all over America and move to New York City,
many with trust funds, to attend very expensive music schools. The
film Whiplash (2014) received passionate criticism in jazz circles for
being unrepresentative because its protagonist is precisely a young
white man studying jazz drumming at a New York City conservatory,
surrounded by other white male students and dreaming of following in
the footsteps of celebrated, white big band drummer Buddy Rich. Many
objected to how disconnected the students learning process was from
jazz reality, which is black, small group, and avant garde, but arguably
(completely bypassing the drama between the student and his sadistic
teacher, as well as the absurd footage of the protagonists practice ses-
sions), Whiplash depicts todays jazz conservatory culture, the first stage
in the ongoing gentrification of jazz, pretty accurately.
But there are fifty shades of white, as one discovers watching the
satirical YouTube video series called Hans Groiner Plays Monk (2007)
in which the white, Jewish jazz pianist Larry Goldings dresses up as an
Austrian pianist so offended by the music of Thelonious Monk that he
reharmonizes it, thereby removing everything that makes the music
gritty, challenging, and rhythmically strange. Reharmonizing standards
is a common practice in contemporary jazz, and almost every new
record that comes out includes arrangements of known tunes. The
videos, which went jazz-viral a few years ago, position the American
jazz player (the implicit viewer) as somehow less white than the clown-
ish, platinum blond European on display. The implication is that even
though jazz musicians and audiences are overwhelmingly white, with
Goldings himself as a great example, at least theyre not this white.
There is always someone whiter than the white American jazz musician,
namely the foreigner, usually European or perhaps Asian, both groups
that heavily populate the conservatories currently.
Melancholy longing for a lost blackness, a longing whose correlate
is an aversive paranoia about whiteness, especially ones own, is ironi-
cally becoming deeper the more we participate in the very technologies
which mark this particular neoliberal late capitalist moment. Many
white musicians are arguably even more focused on the blackness of
jazz than Wynton and Payton are, blogging about the need to check out
the tradition and to learn about its roots, whether those be in Africa or
the black church.2 Meanwhile what is emerging in response to this is a
sort of safe, gentrified version of black music, which continues to fulfill
white fantasies of blackness. For example, Banana Republic chose three
musicians for their 2009 vimeo ad campaign City Stories, which was
ostensibly supposed to show urban blackness, appeal to young people,
and offer proof that jazz is still hip. They strategically chose three people
of color, Esperanza Spalding, Miguel Zenon, and David Sanchez, but all
three are light skinned, mixed race people. They are not too black, a
point underscored by their being dressed in the whitest, most suburban
clothes in the world, namely Banana Republic. And there are several
other stories of avant-garde black music completely missing from the
conversation, ones not as easily linkable to New Orleans, gospel, com-
mercial funk, R &B, and what counts as black music today: Ornette
Coleman, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, George Lewis, and Anthony
Braxton are just the first and most immediate names to come to mind.
Perhaps because it is historically too connected to the white avant garde,
and thus to European art, this African American art music tradition is
consistently excluded from todays debates about jazz and race.
Rather than solving any of these issues in the present chapter, I am
interested in why we desire to settle them today, perhaps even more
strongly than in the past. I suspect this desire is symptomatic of the
panic around social life that is connected to internet technology.
In other words, the race conversation is about a lot more than just race.
An expression of a desire for a common ancestry, it is also about com-
munity (musicians of all races agreeing that the music is really black,
for example) and thus a shared project, or space of common values. But
for jazz, this crisis of community has special consequences, if Berliner
is right that for almost a century the jazz community has functioned
as a large educational system for producing, preserving, and transmit-
ting musical knowledge, from apprenticeships to jam sessions to the
culture of sitting in and finally to professional affiliations (Berliner,
1994, p. 37). Furthermore, since the social is so operative in small group
improvised music, anxiety around social life necessarily affects the
music itself at the most basic level, the level of the playing.
Alone Together: Reprise
What exactly is a community? Crises of community are nothing new.

French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes community as divided
into two levels, the level of the imaginary and that of the actual labor
of community. On the level of the imaginary, all communities are in a
sense lost, and striving for greater unification.
The lost, or broken community can be exemplified in all kinds of

ways, by all kinds of paradigms: the natural family, the Athenian city,
the Roman Republic, the first Christian community, corporations,
communes, or brotherhoods always it is a matter of a lost age in
which community was woven of tight, harmonious, and infrangible
bonds and in which above all it played back to itself, through its
institutions, its rituals, and its symbols, the representation, indeed the
living offering, of its own immanent unity, intimacy, and autonomy.
(Nancy, 1991, p. 9)
That lost age never existed, but the longing for it is built deeply into
Western social imaginaries. Todays crisis in jazz echoes something like
this, playing back to itself Berliners fantasy of a brotherhood unified by
love (if not for each other, then for the music). Alongside the imaginary,
we remain engaged in the labor of community, the logic of which must
be understood otherwise, he argues. Nancys notion of inoperative
community shows that community is not an entity, but a being-with,
a movement of unworking and incompletion. Community can never
be anything but incompletion, because only incompletion allows for
singularities to be-with each other, rather than being alone. It is not
a matter of making, producing, or instituting a community; nor is it a
matter of venerating or fearing within it a sacred power it is a matter
of incompleting its sharing. Sharing is always incomplete or it is beyond
completion and incompletion. For a complete sharing implies the dis-
appearance of what is shared (Nancy, 1991, p. 35, emphasis mine).
Community is always and by definition open to rearticulation.
If Nancy is right that sharing implies the impossibility of comple-
tion, we can begin to see how the fantasy of community manifested in
todays social networking culture actually works against the possibility
of being-with. Sherri Turkles critique of social media, Alone Together:
Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2012), by
some happy coincidence named after one of the best-loved standards
for musicians to call at jam sessions, describes technologically mediated
relationships as relationships the way we want them, reminding us
that real relationships are unstable, destabilizing, unpredictable, and
often painful. In other words, love hurts, but not on the Internet. She
argues that contemporary technology reveals, speaks to, and produces
fear of intimacy and what she calls fatigue with the difficulties of life
with people (Turkle, 2012, p. 10).
While Turkle focuses on how technology constructs a particular
experience of other people (the way we want them), Jonathan Crarys
book 24/7 (2014) zeroes in on the experience of time in late capital-
ism, offering a different spin on exactly how the Internet forecloses
the possibility of community. The 24/7 non-time of capitalism neces-
sarily interferes with any possibility of being-with one another. As the
Internet appears to create conditions of sharing finally free of the pesky
constraints of human time and human life cycles, simply because any-
one can virtually reach out and touch someone anywhere and at any
time, these technologies actually impede the possibility of authentic
relation, creating instead conditions of radical individualism and the
breakdown of the experience of time in common. Self-fashioning is the
work we are all given, and we dutifully comply with the prescription
continually to reinvent ourselves and manage our intricate identities
(Crary, 2014, p. 72). We are told that without an online presence, we
will disappear, professionally and socially, a threat which, taken to its
logical end, results in a society of people hungry for social co-existence,
terrified of ceasing to be in common with each other, but stuck in a
cycle of compulsive self-fashioning, thereby working against the work
of being-with. If it may be said that there is a mode of being-with that
characterizes Facebook, it is a contradiction: what we share is an inca-
pacity to share, as we share the mania for fashioning ourselves. Crary
adds to this what he calls 24/7 temporality, the time of late capitalism,
a switched-on universe for which no off-switch exists. He continues:
Of course, no individual can ever be shopping, gaming, working, blog-

ging, downloading, or texting 24/7. However, since no moment, place,
or situation now exists in which one can not shop, consume, or exploit
networked resources, there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of
24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life. There are, for example,
almost no circumstances now that can not be recorded or archived as
digital imagery or information. One inhabits a world in which long-
standing notions of shared experience atrophy, and yet one never
actually attains the gratifications or rewards promised by the most
recent technological options. In spite of the omnipresent proclama-
tions of compatibility, even harmonization, between human time
and the temporalities of networked systems, the lived realities of this
relationship are disjunctions, fractures, and continual disequilibrium.
(Crary, 2014, pp. 301)
To be clear, the issue is not that there is some substratum of authen-

tic existence underneath the facades that appear in social networking.
Crary is not calling for a return to some more natural, pretechnological
existence. But there are aspects of being alive which actively frustrate
the logic of Internet circulation, and it is those aspects of being alive that
are necessary for intersubjective experience in general, and specifically
for the intersubjectivity that improvisation requires.
Strangers in the Night: Improvisation and Visibility
Why is Jazz Robots funny? Is it because robots cant improvise, and

so we laugh at them? Or is it because everyone sounds the same these
days and thus, to quote Kraftwerk, we are the robots and the joke is
on us? Turkle reminds us that we insert robots into every narrative
of human frailty. People make too many demands; robot demands
would be of a more manageable sort. People disappoint, robots will
not (Turkle, 2012, p. 10). Once again, in contrast to Turkle, Crarys
critique has different consequences for jazz than the more obvious
point that improvising requires a degree of vulnerability that we ascribe
only to humans (correctly or not). His point is that such vulnerability
is the result of interaction, of being-with. In fact, one of the strengths
of Crarys critique is that it doesnt commit him to any claims about
what it is to be human, or how exactly humans are not robots. We do
not fail at sociality because of the atrophying of some human quality
or other, but because of the atrophying of social life itself, a slow death
that results specifically from 24/7 visibility.
To extend this to jazz, the constant surveillance introduced by social
technologies is anathema to the way jazz has historically existed in
sites of non-visibility, from the darkness of nightclubs, to the deliberate
opacity and inaccessibility of the avant garde. This non-visibility was
historically overtly related to questions of race, in ways that may be
more productive for debates in the scene today than the well-rehearsed
refrain about African origins. Returning to the (as we have seen, con-
tested) figure of the black jazz trumpeter, when Miles Davis famously
performed with his back to audiences, it was not only an aesthetic or
technical choice because, as every performer knows, it is much more
comfortable and intimate to perform facing ones rhythm section than
with ones back to it but also a political one. In contrast to images
of Louis Armstrong, which indulged white expectations of a certain
minstrel-show like, highly visible blackness, Miles literally turned away
from the white gaze. He became an icon, of course, but the blackness he
presents is qualitatively different from that presented by images of black

musicians prior to the 1940s. This change is inextricably bound to the
shift in the music from commodifiable dance music for the enjoyment
of white audiences to the coolness and intellectualism of bebop and
much of what came afterwards.
But the more elusive sense in which visibility and jazz do not mix is
really at the heart of my critique: 24/7 visibility is directly incompat-
ible with improvisation. By improvisation, I do not mean the jazz
language that one learns in school and then deploys at jam sessions.
I mean that nameless, elusive thing that sometimes, if rarely, comes
about during improvising with people. That thing (?) has many names,
but for the sake of simplicity I will follow the French philosophers in
calling it the event. Jean-Francois Lyotard writes that what character-
izes an event, the event-ality of events, is not the sense that something
big or important is happening, but that everything is suspended and
we are left wondering is it happening? It is this quality of suspension
that is fundamentally incommensurable with visibility and nameabil-
ity, and is thus incompatible with the Internet. The is it happening?,
suspended interminably in question form, is also what makes improvi-
sation irreducibly relational. From this perspective, improvising with
others is less a matter of aesthetics, and more a matter of ethics.
A popular misconception about improvisation is that it results in
something unique and completely new. To the contrary, Jacques Derrida
(1982) shows that improvisation can take place only in conditions of
repetition and recognizability:
Its not easy to improvise, its the most difficult thing to do. Even
when one improvises in front of a camera or microphone, one ven-
triloquizes or leaves another to speak in ones place the schemas and
languages that are already there. There are already a great number of
prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and in our culture.
All the names are already preprogrammed. Its already the names that
inhibit our ability to ever really improvise. One cant say whatever
one wants, one is obliged more or less to reproduce the stereotypical
discourse.
Because improvisation is possible only by means of the repetition of

preexisting language, there is no true self of the soloist to access at that
moment. Derrida (1982) continues, And there, where there is improvi-
sation I am not able to see myself. I am blind to myself. Its for oth-
ers to see. The one who is improvised here, no, I wont ever see him.
The true self of the improviser is accessible only to other, and not to
herself. Improvisation thus creates something not subject to circulation
and exchange, not by creating something absolutely unique in time
and space, or something proper to the player (self-expression), but
something recalcitrant and not subject to disciplinary control. And it
is the essential recalcitrance of the improvising self that makes improvisation
an experience of sharing, or of the necessary incompleteness that constitutes
community. I am at that very moment precisely not able to see myself,
and from this follows the possibility of being-with others.
Finally, it is not only the self that becomes recalcitrant, but also the
environment. Environmental theorist Timothy Morton writes about
improvisation as a form of what he calls the ecological thought,
ecological because it overflows reality, imagines different worlds, and
is ruled by the uncanny encounter with strange strangers. In both
cases, the point is that something happens which frustrates vision and
comprehension, exceeds it, and places us somewhere strange. When
improvisation happens, we are not at home. Far from providing an
experience of presence, or truth, or authenticity, much less anything
like self-expression or be here now, improvisation is the fundamental
breakdown of the self, the ground, and the world. Morton links this
to what he calls the poetics of anywhere (Morton, 2010, p. 50). The
closer we look at our location the here the more we realize that it is
shot through with the possibility of being anywhere, and the more we
seek to know the stranger, the stranger they appear.
Concluding Remarks
Thus, the death of jazz at the hands of the Internet wont have been
about the economic shifts that result from filesharing, and the whiten-
ing of jazz wont have been merely the latest example of how white
America steals the best of black culture. Internet sociality, an atrophied
sociality that forecloses the interstitial nature of being-with and thus
precludes community, is at the heart of the present ostensibly postracial
moment. To eulogize jazz by focusing solely on changes in the market
is to treat the music as if it remained intact through these social and
economic shifts. But it does not remain intact. The deep relational-
ity of jazz suffers when the social becomes atrophied, compromised,
shallow. Contemporary technologies effect a cultural shift away from
investment in non-visibility, incompleteness, opacity, and recalcitrance.
Because of this we face a much more serious crisis of community than
one gathers from blogs and tweets bemoaning dissensus in the scene or
the loss of black roots, or (usually) both. The more serious crisis is the
one faced by improvisation itself, and the real danger to jazz is not that
it might die, but its zombie apocalypse, the undeath of jazz, its contin-
ued taxidermic, museified, nonliving existence, presented in todays
music market as the real deal.
Notes
1. I thank Mark Ferber for this phrase.
2. See for instance Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iversons (2015) response to Whiplash
on his blog Do The Math, currently very popular with musicians.
Bibliography
Banana Republic. (2009) City Stories (online). Available from: http://vimeo.com/
19938906 (accessed January 1, 2015).
Berliner, Paul F. (1994) Thinking in Jazz: The Innite Art of Improvisation. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Crary, J. (2014) 24/7. New York: Verso Books.
Derrida, J. (1982) Unpublished Interview (1982) (online). Available from: http://
www.derridathemovie.com/readings.html (accessed January 1, 2015).
Groiner, Hans (2007) Hans Groiner: The Music of Thelonious Monk, vol. 1
(online). Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
(accessed January 1, 2015).
Iverson, E. (2015) The Drum Thing, or a Brief History of Whiplash, or Im
Generalizing Here (online). Available from: http://dothemath.typepad.com/
dtm/the-drum-thing.html (accessed March 13, 2015).
Jazzistheworst. (2014) How to Become a Successful Jazz Musician in 2015 (online).
Available from: http://jazzistheworst.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-become-
successful-jazz-musician.html (accessed March 14, 2015).
Jazzistheworst. (2015) (Online). Available from: http://twitter/jazzistheworst
(accessed March 13, 2015).
Jazz Robots. (2010) Two jazz musicians talk about their recent gig (online).
Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1fWJKaUZ_4 (accessed
January 1, 2015).
Morton, T. (2010) The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (1991) The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connon et al.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Payton, Nicholas (2014) (Online). Available at: http://www.nicholaspayton.com/
(accessed January 15, 2014).
Stuffwhitepeoplelike. (2008) #116 Black Music That Black People Dont Listen To
Anymore (online). Available from: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/11/18/
116-black-music-that-black-people-dont-listen-to-anymore/ (accessed March 10,
2015).
Turkle, Sherry. (2012.) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology
and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
Whiplash (2014). Directed by Damian Chazelle.
5
A Brief Consideration of the
Hip-Hop Biopic
Richard Purcell
Introduction
From the beginning, the moving image and narrative film have played
an integral if still under-theorized role in both documenting and creat-
ing hip-hop culture; enough so that I think an argument can be made
that it is a forgotten fifth element of hip-hop (Rose, 1994; Chang,
2006). Cinema, primarily through genres like the musical and subgenres
like the biopic, construct fantasies about creativity and labor that many
hip-hop films invoke (Altman, 1989; Feuer, 1993; Dyer, 2002; Cohan,
2005; Knight, 2002; Custen, 1992; Bingham, 2010 Berger, 2014). Elements
of these genres can be found throughout the history of hip-hop films and
I will especially focus on the biopic to draw attention to the way these
films like much of hip-hop culture demonstrates its complicated rela-
tionship to creative labor. As a genre, the biopic (or biographical film)
is a creature of the Hollywood studio system. It is a genre that enjoyed
an incredible amount of popularity after World War II with an emphasis
on narratives of upward social mobility and self-reflexivity about the
studio system itself (Vidal, 2014; Bingham, 2010; Custen 1992). For the
purposes of this essay I am interested in a particularly self-reflexive ver-
sion of the biopic that emerged out the Hollywood musical after WWII.
As Rick Altman writes, films like Jolson Sings Again (1949), Singing in the
Rain (1952) and The Band Wagon (1953) purposefully foreground the
cinematic means and materials of production the actual stars, cinematic
conventions and technologies of the studio system in order to reaffirm
Hollywoods ability to more convincingly reproduce the creative self
(Altman, 1989, p. 252). This moebus strip of authenticity, bent between
the cinematic image, musical performance and the industrial forms of
entertainment are at the heart of these films. Instead of petering out with
84
A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic 85
the studio system or the genre of the musical artist, biopics have only
proliferated in the post studio system era; enough so that we must won-
der if they double as biographies of the neoclassical studio system itself
(Bingham, 2010; Berger, 2014; Connor, 2015). This is to suggest that the
prevalence of the artist biopic within the history of hip-hop films seems
a useful way into understanding how artists and the culture industry
imagine creative musical labor especially as it pertains to race that
can be both radical and conservative (Feuer, 1993).
I am far from the first to focus on the relationship between hip-hop
and creative labor. This essay builds on and hopes to add to the work
already done by Tricia Rose and Robin D.G. Kelley, who still remain
the most important touchstones on the relationship between hip-hop
and what we now talk about as creative labor (Rose, 1994; Judy, 1994b;
Kelley, 1996 and 1998; Boyd, 1997; Watkins, 1998; Neal, 2001). Where
Rosss book and Kelleys essay are wide-ranging and look at multiple areas
where race, play-labor (Kelley, 1998, p. 197) and political economy
intersect I will focus on a small part of hip-hops relationship to these
matters: filmic representations of hip-hop, artistry and labor. Most of this
essay will focus on the first cycle of loosely conceived biopics about hip-
hop culture, with particular attention paid to two independent films: Edo
Bertoglios Downtown 81 (1981) and Charles Ahearns Wild Style (1982) as
well as one studio feature, Michael Schultzs Krush Groove (1985), which
was produced and distributed by Warner Brothers. These films represent
the shifting values that art, authenticity and creative labor have had
within hip-hop culture; especially once the priorities of high concept
cinema transformed commercial filmmaking into a delivery system for
commercial music and other goods (Wyatt 1994, Prince 2002). By way
of a coda I will bring these concerns into more contemporary hip-hop
films, the rise of the sharing economy and the crisis of musical valuation.
What Is Hip-Hop Cinema?
Perhaps the first and most difficult question to answer is: what is hip-
hop? More often than not this is less a concern about the universally
recognized four elements of hip-hop performance: mcing, turntablism,
graffiti and breakdancing. Instead it is about finding a central aesthetic or
ideological core to what began as a predominately black and Latino youth
culture. For some, hip-hop culture has and continues to play a central
role in imagining some continuity between the Civil Rights movement,
the various power movements of the 60s and 70s and a youth-cen-
tered cultural movement like hip-hop (Chang, 2005; Kitwana, 2002;
86 Richard Purcell
Rose, 1994; Dyson, 2007; Forman, 2002; Watkins, 2005). At the same
time, others have chronicled the long, fraught history hip-hop artists
have had with the free market and neoliberal rhetoric of late-capitalism,
which at times flies in the face of more radical liberatory rhetoric
(Charnas, 2010; Neal, 2001; Smith, 2012; Spence, 2011). These bigger
questions about race, aesthetics, ideology and political economy have
long been and continue to be a part of the important work of black
cinema studies. Surprisingly, despite the scholarly attention given to the
films of Spike Lee, the incredibly profitable and influential urban cycle
of black cinema in the early to mid-1990s, the crossover of rappers into
A-list televisual and feature film entertainment and the role of music
videos in marketing what Jeff Chang has accurately called hip-hop as
lifestyle, there is still surprisingly little media studies scholarship on the
explicit relationship between hip-hop culture and cinema (Monteyne,
2013; Watkins, 1998; Chang, 2006).
Like the general discipline of film studies in its nascent decades, early
black cinema studies was also invested in a multiplicity of historical and
analytic pursuits. If one looks through the foundational book length
works of academic black cinema studies the contents run the gambit
of cinema studies concerns: historical and archival work, ideological
analysis of commercial and Blaxploitation cinema, world film and the
rise of independent cinema (Guerrero, 1993; Diawara, 1992; Bobo,
1998; Bogel, 2001; Reid, 1993; Smith, 1997; Cripps, 1978; hooks, 1996;
Yearwood, 1982; Rhines, 1996). Of paramount importance throughout
all these works are the politics of representation since American cinema,
having emerged alongside the legacies of black-face minstrelsy through-
out the American arts, has long perpetuated racist stereotypes about
black humanity (Diawara, 1993). It is not as if hip-hop has not crossed
paths with the pioneering work done in black cinema studies over the
last four decades. But given the intellectual and political priorities of
black cinema studies, hip-hop has been both a blessing and curse to the
politics of black representation and aesthetics (Judy 1994a).
Although films about hip-hop are absent from early black cinema stud-
ies scholarship, Spike Lee was the cypher through which hip-hop appeared
(hooks, 1996; Diawara, 1993; Reid, 1993; Guerrero, 1993; Massoud, 2003;
Watkins, 1998). Lee provides an important if oblique connection to hip-
hop in early black cinema studies, yet is often represented as a starting
point to sketch the outlines of what has come to be known as hip-hop
cinema. The best example of this also appears in one of the most foun-
dational works of black cinema studies: S. Craig Watkins Representing:
Hip-Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (1998). Watkins focuses
on a span of films that runs from Lees first feature film, Shes Gotta
Have It (1986) to the premier of the Hughes Brothers feature Menace
II Society (1993). In explaining his periodization, Watkins (1998) tells
us that from 1986 to 1993, black youth began to mobilize around the
resources of the popular media in ways that are simultaneously visible,
complex, problematic, and commercially viable (p. 67). Perhaps most
important to Watkins are the possibilities of collective and symbolic
action, especially from the social margins of society (p. 67). Clearly, he
wants to draw hip-hop into the possibility of collective and symbolic
political action that was explicit in the new black realism. When Watkins
begins to describe what is particularly hip-hop about the films of Lee
and Singleton, he reverts to a discourse that reveals his anxiety about
the relationship hip-hop has to the powerful forces of corporate com-
modification (p. 171). Hip-hop, primarily through gangsta rap music,
becomes a style used and nurtured by movie studios to market films like
Boyz n the Hood. Watkins is not alone in grappling with how to define
the aesthetic and conventions of hip-hop cinema. More contemporary
critics have also struggled to define hip-hop cinematic tropes that, as Jeff
Chang (2006) writes, reflect the cultural ideals hip-hop was founded
on (p. 306).
That Watkins and others have shied away from making any genre
claims is to their credit. Genre, as Watkins (1998) writes, is a difficult
term to sustain analytically because the boundaries are so fluid
(p. 170). Yet, beyond his passing mention of Michael Schultzs Krush
Groove (1985), there is little attention paid to the important cycle of
films that falls slightly before and within the period Watkins covers; a
span that runs from independently produced Wild Style (1982) to the
Def Pictures/New Line Cinema produced Tougher than Leather (1988).
All of these films are centered on the elements or performers rooted in
the elements of hip-hop culture. The most significant genre question
these early hip-hop films raise has to do with the biological category
of race. Besides Schultzs Krush Groove none of these more generically
identifiable commercial films are directed by African Americans. Here
we can see the conflicted relationship between black cinema studies
scholarship and hip-hop cinema as many of these early hip-hop films
are arguably teen-exploitation films that attempt to capitalize on the
incredible popularity of rap music and break dancing in the mid-1980s
(Watkins 1998). Watkins elision of these teen films returns us to ques-
tions having to do with political economy and its relationship to the
politics of representation within commercial entertainment. If the pos-
sibility of collective and symbolic political action is fundamental to
88 Richard Purcell
both black cinema and hip-hop then the films of Lee, Singleton and the
Hughes Brothers engage these politics in ways that are either absent or
politically ambivalent in either more mainstream or independent films
produced and directed by non-black people.
Kimberly Monteynes Hip-Hop on Film: Performance, Culture, Urban
Space and Genre Transformation in the 1980s (2013) attempts to address
this reading by arguing that early hip-hop films have both absorbed
and radically changed the long-standing conventions of the classical
Hollywood musical. Taking a more semantic/syntactic approach to
genre, Monteyne shows that these earlier, more generically stable films
are infused with a similar interest in the politics of representation and
political economy that Watkins finds in the films of Lee and Singleton.
In fact, she suggests that proper attention to hip-hop cinema as a genre
has been overshadowed by the importance of New Black Realism in the
late-1980s and 1990s (Monteyne, 2013, p. 4). Early hip-hop films reliably
feature the presence of at least some, if not all, of hip-hops four elements,
the use of diegetic musical performance and a narrative culminating
in romance as well as a final production number (Monteyne, 2013,
pp. 56). However, while following the prescribed generic film musical
structures and patterns, hip-hop cinema transforms the rather con-
servative ideological elements of the Hollywood musical by presenting
a positive, multiethnic and racial representation of American inner city
life during the 1980s (Monteyne, 2013, p. 6). While Monteynes very
formalist generic approach rescues these earlier films from the dustbin
of cinematic studies history, hip-hop films raise lingering methodologi-
cal concerns having to do with genre study, the institutional formation
of black cinema studies, as well as larger epistemological and aesthetic
questions about hip-hop itself.
While I cannot delve into all of these concerns here, for my purpose
the most significant has to do with the use of commercial film as the
organizing principle through which to gauge the relationship between
hip-hop, cinema and questions of black political economy. Despite
Watkins hesitance to use strict genre identification or Monteynes strong
adherence to the conventions of the classical Hollywood musical, start-
ing the narrative of hip-hop cinema within the history of commercial
film ignores its more unruly and ambiguous roots. A strong case can
be made that Gary Weis 1979 documentary about South Bronx gang
life 80 Blocks from Tiffanys, Manfred Kirchheimers cinema verite hom-
age to subway graffiti Stations of the Elevated (1981) along with Tony
Silvers graffiti classic Style Wars (1983), Edo Bertoglios Downtown 81
(1981/2000) and, most importantly, Wild Style (1982) connect the history
of hip-hop to the cinematic legacies of non-narrative, avant garde film-

making as well as the fraught cultural politics of the downtown New York
arts scene in the late 1970s and 1980s; an aesthetic and political context
from which the more well-known Wild Style emerges. Additionally, these
films suggest that the origins of hip-hops cultural and racial politics also
lie outside of rap music, which had yet to become a global phenomenon.
Weis, Kirchheimer, and Silvers respective films benefited from networks
of documentary film distribution and production that shielded them
from the pressures of the market place. To a certain extent Downtown 81
and Wild Style benefited as well. At the same time they were both pro-
duced within an alternative art community that openly grappled with its
ambivalent relationship to the commercial art and film market.
Cinema, Collectivism and Street Art
Despite the growing commodification of alternative culture and politi-

cal conservatism of the 1980s, Julie Ault suggests that it was also the
golden age of political art and art collectives (Ault, 2002). Some of
these groups had their roots in the politicized social formations of the
past and present Maoism, Third Worldism, and anarchism amongst
others (Moore 2007). At the same time collectives are emblematic of
artistic labor itself, which given the institutional, economic and legal
circumstances of art making makes such collective endeavors a neces-
sity. While noise, Punk and No Wave music were a critical expressive
medium in the emergent performance and exhibition scene in the
Lower East Side, hip-hop was primarily represented through graffiti
art and artists. Hip-hop also had a small but important relationship to
the underground No Wave/New Cinema and video movement in the
late 1970s and early 1980s. While not a collective, the No Wave move-
ment was an underground music, film and contemporary art scene
that emerged on the Lower East Side during the late 1970s through the
mid-1980s (Yokobosky, 1996). For both its symbolic as well as stylistic
value it should be of little surprise that the artists closely associated
with the politics of street art would also play central roles in the cinema
produced out of this moment.
Both Wild Style and Downtown 81 were conceived and shot in the
midst of this No Wave boom of the late 1970s and 80s. The embrace of
vernacular and pop art mediums and the democratization of recording
technology that defined the aesthetics of the alternative art scene was
equally important within No Wave cinema. These films, like the other
elements of the No-Wave/Punk and collectivist arts scene, rejected the
90 Richard Purcell
academic formalism of the gallery arts scene as well as the conventions

of classical and New Hollywood commercial cinema (Yokobosky, 1996).
They were also emblematic of the way artistic collectives structured and
were used to represent expressive life in New York City during the 1970s
and 80s. Two of the most important were Colab (Collaborative Projects)
and Fashion Moda, the Bronx based, Colab affiliated exhibition space.
In June of 1980, months before the production began on Downtown 81
or Wild Style, Colab and Fashion Moda produced one of the most impor-
tant exhibitions of neo-Expressionist, Pop Art and graffiti: the Times
Square Show (1980), which most notably for this essay at least show-
cased the art work of Jean Michel Basquiat and renowned Fabulous Five
graffiti artists Lee Quinones and Fred Braithwaite; all three of whom
would be the featured stars in Downtown 81 and Wild Style.
The Times Square Show itself was the culmination of about a decade
of important developments in New York Citys art world that was also
intertwined with the New Cinema and Punk scenes in the late 1970s. An
important precursor to the Times Square Show was an early Colab exhi-
bition, the Real Estate Show, which opened on January 1, 1980. As Alan
Moore describes it, the Real Estate Show had its roots in the anger many
Tribeca artists felt in being gentrified out of their neighborhood (Moore,
2007, p. 328). It also led to the creation of a number of more politicized
artist collectives that would necessarily split their time between art,
social advocacy and the necessary commercial side of selling art (Moore
2007 and Ault 2002). This model of advocacy, community involvement
and commercial art informed the creation of Fashion Moda as well,
which was founded in 1978 by Stefan Eins and co-managed with Joe
Lewis. Enis and Lewis would exhibit some of the late 20th centurys
most important neo-expressionist artists as well as serve as an avenue
to connect local graffiti writers, rappers, DJs and break dancers to the
burgeoning Lower East Side alternative art community (Castleman,
1982; Chalfant and Cooper 1984; Chalfant and Jenkins, 2014). Just
as important, Moda, like some Lower East Side art collectives, fostered
community art projects that included local artist collaborations with
residents. One project in particular, spearheaded by John Ahearn (the
twin brother of Wild Style director Charlie Ahearn) and Rigoberto
Torres, was a series of incredibly popular if controversial sculpture
murals of South Bronx residents that appeared on the side of tene-
ment buildings between 1981 and 1985 (Kwon, 2002). Even if Moda
or the AhearnTorres murals were not part of the same ideologically
informed politics of some of its contemporary collectives it nonetheless
showed the intimate if still complicated relationship between artists, the
neighborhoods they resided in and the gallery space, which had become
a mechanism to show the community to itself (Kwon, 2002, p. 306).
Between the premier of the Times Square Show in June of 1980, the
principal shooting of Downtown 81 in December 1980 and the first
run of Wild Style in 1982, the alternative art network in New York
City went through an era-defining expansion. Times Square Show was
the catalyst in a three-year run of exhibitions that embodied both the
politicized spirit and commercial growth of the alternative art commu-
nity in the early 1980s. This spate of artist-run exhibitions, at least for
a time, succeeded in obscuring the commodity status of the art itself.
In 1981, former Colab member Diego Cortez curated the New York/New
Wave show at P.S. 1 in Queens, Charas hosted the 9th Street Survival Show,
and perhaps most famously The Fun Gallery, a small gallery directed
by underground film actress Patti Astor, opened. Looking back on the
proliferation of galleries and collectives that emerged out of Colab
and the Times Square Show, Alan Moore writes that along with the
intentional celebration of populist and vernacular art there was a stra-
tegic reaction against government funded alternative art and, at least
initially an appropriation of the idea of the gallery fraught with self-
consciousness and humor (Moore, 2007, p. 330). Even the respective
locations of the Times Square Show, New York/New Wave and other pop-
up galleries and performance art spaces either parodied the traditional
business style of SoHo and mid-town galleries or were in buildings
and neighborhoods that did not conform to the exhibition aesthetic.
Especially in the case of the Times Square Show, these strategies of
exhibition works mounted at the Times Square Show lacked title or the
names of the artists opened up the gallery experience for populations
that would not otherwise visit.
The Times Square Show also featured the work of an unprecedented
number of women and artists of color. Professional trained artists like
Candice Hill Montgomery intermingled with graffiti writers who in
some instances were displaying their work in a gallery for the first
time (Thompson 2010 and Lippard 1990). Nonetheless, many of
these shows, despite being conceptualized and exhibited as critique
were conceived in the commercial terms of the art world (Moore,
2007, p. 330; Lippard, 1990; Thompson, 2010; Goldstein, 1980). As
Margo Thompson observes, the ambivalence these artist-run collec-
tives felt toward entrenched art market practices did not mean they
could afford to turn their backs on their benefactors completely
(Thompson, 2010). Given the centrifugal force that art collectives and
the music scene exerted, it comes as little surprise that No Wave cinema
92 Richard Purcell
expressed an ambivalent politics towards the market as well. There was

a current of political critique toward American governmental policy
in films like Scott and Beth Bs Black Box and G-Men, while others like
Rome 78 parodied the conventions of the classical Hollywood epic.
Simultaneously, films as diverse as Underground USA (1980), Smithereens
(1981) and They Eat Scum (1979) exhibited a level of self-awareness that
the Punk and No Wave movements were becoming increasingly com-
modified. By the late 1970s and early 80s No Wave cinema, like the
gallery arts scene, had reached a crossroads. Many of these films would
invoke the conventions of the artist biopic in order to provide a power-
ful commentary on the art-world vacuum being created by the forces
of gentrification and more commercialized galleries (Hoberman 1979).
Yet, the black, Latino and Asian people who made up a significant part
of the Lower East Sides population were either absent or primarily
relegated to mise en scne.
Downtown 81, Wild Style and (at) Work
This is what makes Wild Style as well as Downtown 81 such unique

works in the No Wave oeuvre. Both feature protagonists of color, and
in the case of Wild Style a primarily black and Latino cast. If one of the
central elements of the collectivist art community was an attempt to
show the community to itself, more often than not this was a solip-
sistic affair, exhibiting the worst aspect of the symbiotic relationships
within the No Wave music, cinema and arts scene. (Hoberman 1979).
Wild Style, and to a certain extent Downtown 81, are perhaps two of the
few No Wave films that breaks from this mold. This does not mean
Wild Style and Downtown 81 are exempt from this solipsism since both
were produced, directed and, in the case of Downtown 81, starred key
figures in the No Wave arts community. It also means that these early
filmic instances of hip-hop are preoccupied, albeit in different ways,
with the conflicts that many within the downtown arts scene grappled
with: gentrification, the commodification of the alternative arts com-
munity as well as the complex relationship these artists had with the
predominately black, Latino and Asian neighborhoods they lived in.
Downtown 81 fits the more playful but still self-reflexive and critical
attributes of late No Wave/New Cinema films. Although shot in the
winter of 1980, the film, written by Glenn OBrien, directed by Edo
Bertogilo and starring a yet to be famous Jean Michel Basquiat, would
not see the cinematic light of day until 1999. Downtown 81 was pro-
duced and financed by French fashion designer Marisol and the Italian
publishing conglomerate Rizzoli to showcase the emergent New Wave/

No Wave scene. The films very loose, quixotic plot revolves around
Basquiat (playing a fictional version of himself), a post-Punk flaneur
who wanders around the Lower East Side attempting to sell a paint-
ing in order to pay rent. Basquiats travels bring him into contact with
some of the then well-known No Wave artists and musicians, who
for the most part play themselves. We see Basquiat fall into and by
the end of the film out of love with a famous Italian fashion model
named Beatrice, hit up walls with some of his most iconic SAMO pieces,
attempt to track down his bands stolen equipment and visit famous
No Wave haunts like the Mudd Clubb and the Peppermint Lounge. The
film itself is interspersed with both diegetic and non-narrative musi-
cal performances by Tuxedomoon, DNA, The Plastics, hip-hoppers like
Kool Kyle, and the funk fusion band Kid Creole and the Coconuts.
As a No Wave showcase, Downtown 81 reveals the dynamic aesthetic
ethos of the New York arts scene. No Wave and Post-Punk musicians
intermingle with the hip-hoppers, fashion models, scene mavens,
painters and sculptors. At the same time OBrien and Bertoglio turn this
showcase into a comedic yet critical look at the means of artistic produc-
tion. Keeping with the nature of No Wave cinema, the films insider look
into No Wave uses Hollywoods Golden Age musical biopic as a parodic
device. After World War II Hollywood musicals began to foreground and
undercut what Rick Altman called the conventions of the show musi-
cal syntax only in order to reaffirm them all the more convincingly
(Altman 1987, p. 252). This inevitably led to a revival of the musical
through, in part, a return of the artist biopic, which guaranteed the
authenticity of screen biographies through the paradoxical tech-
nique of foregrounding the very technology that supposedly distances
the filmed stage star (Altman, 1987, p. 253). Where the function of
the biopic would be to legitimate the myth-making technologies and
talents of the Hollywood studio system, Downtown 81 does the exact
opposite. The film constantly returns the viewer to scenes focused on
the frustrations and failure of artistic labor, most of which are centered
on Basquiats semi-autobiographical early trials and tribulations. He
endures homelessness and unwanted or in some cases unfulfilled sexual
advances, which are intimately tied to commerce and the semi-celebrity
of the art world. When he is finally paid for his painting it is in the form
of a check, which of course he cannot cash because he does not have a
checking account (Figure 5.1a).
Basquiat is not the only character who laments the impossible con-
ditions of creative labor. One of the most explicit scenes of lament is
94 Richard Purcell
a comedic, direct address by musician and painter Walter Steding who

exposes the long, alienating production chain of creative labor. He
describes dragging music equipment to shows and dealing with cheap
club owners, self-important music journalists and eventually duplicitous
record labels. Steding, breaking the cinematic fourth wall, tells us that
the club owner sees you up on stage having fun and says youre having
fun up there why should I pay you they do it every time (Bertoglio,
1981). The scene ends with a medium, birds-eye view (Figure 5.1b) of
Steding, head down on a desk muttering never again, never again, never
again.... (Bertoglio, 1981). Yet, at the very end of the scene two of his
bandmates appear, cajoling Steding to get ready for band practice. Like a
lot of the uncompensated performances we see in the film, Downtown 81
invites us to knowingly laugh and pity Stedings despair. Basquiats mon-
etary frustrations are finally alleviated at the end not by the benefactors
of the art world, a recognition of his talents or by the wealth and celebrity
of his supermodel love interest, but by a cinematic deus ex machina. After
leaving the Mudd Club Basquiat encounters a homeless woman, played
by Debbie Harry, who turns out to be his fairy godmother and grants
Basquiat a suitcase bursting with cash. The film ends with Basquiat redis-
tributing some of his new-found wealth to some of the homeless on the
Lower East Side, paying cash for a Cadillac Eldorado and driving along
the Lower East Side as the film fades to the credits.
Hip-hop has a strangely ambiguous place in Downtown 81s biopic
nihilism about artistic labor. Within the mise en scne we see Basquiat
perform iconic SAMO pieces on buildings and coffee-table books as
well as interact with Lee Quinones and Fab 5 Freddy as they paint a
building. That early scene immediately segues to Basquiat and Fab 5
Freddy entering a basement to dance while Kool Kyle raps. When the
credits role we are treated to Beat-Bop, a Basquiat produced rap track
(a) (b)
Figure 5.1 Basquiats art gets him a check he cant cash while Stedings brings
despair and little compensation in Bertogilos Downtown 81 (1981)
with Rammellzee and K-Rob on vocals. Beyond these traces however,

the films energies are primarily directed toward the more well-known
No Wave musical personalities. Naturally, it is difficult in the 21st century
to separate Basquiat out from the contemporary effort to claim Basquiat
as hip-hop. As Franklin Sirmans writes, Basquiats early works were an
attack on the subject matter common to rappers and emcees who were
then making hip-hop (Sirmans, 2005, p. 95). Yet there was and still is
an equally forceful and at times troubling attempt, spurred by critics and
to a certain extent by the artist, to distance him from the authenticating
discourse of race and the street. While the talk or recognition of race
is absent from Downtown 81, the DIY, legitimizing power that street art
bestowed to the No Wave scene is not. In this sense hip-hop works to
confer authenticity and monetary value within a film and No Wave
scene that always lurked on the margins.
Throughout Wild Style Ahearn and co-producer Fab 5 Freddy present the
South Bronx as a vibrant aesthetic rival to Downtown 81s playfully jaded
Lower East Side. Ahern began to produce and secure funding for Wild Style
in the immediate months after the Times Square Show. Given the parallel
production dates of Downtown 81 and Wild Style we can see how both films
were an extension of the momentum generated by the growing alternative
art network and No Wave cinema. Like Downtown 81, Wild Styles loose
narrative, use of non-professional actors in semi-autobiographical roles
and knowing use of conventional film genres invoked many of the char-
acteristics of No Wave cinema. Wild Style was not Charlie Ahearns first
feature-length film. Ahearn, one of the founding figures of Colab as well
as the New Cinema exhibition collective, produced longer form films like
The Brooklyn Bridge at Pearl Street (1977), Twins (1980) and perhaps more
importantly his super-8 homage to Bruce Lee, The Deadly Art of Survival
(1978), which starred African American martial arts legend Nathan Ingram
and featured the graffiti art of Lee Quinones. Quinones returns in Wild
Style, this time playing Zoro, a principled, yet mysterious graffiti artist
who struggles to avoid the encroaching limelight that is being shone on
graffiti art from downtown art studios. Ahearn and Fab Five Freddy struc-
ture Wild Style in a very similar fashion as Downtown 81. Zoro and Phade
(played by Fab 5 Freddy) lead us on a journey from the South Bronx to
Manhattans Lower East Side and Brooklyn as the film showcases already
famous graffiti writers like Lady Pink, Phase, and Zephyr, uptown rap stars
and breakdance crews like Grand Master Flash, The Fantastic Freaks, Busy B
and The Rock Steady Crew. We run into familiar No Wave gallery owners and
scene stalwarts like Glenn OBrien playing Neal, a stuffy art critic, and Patti
Astor as Virginia, a journalist who is pursuing a story on Zoro.
96 Richard Purcell
Where Downtown 81 leaves us with an ambivalent impression of

where hip-hop fits in its parodic attack on unalienated artistic labor,
Wild Style does not. Wild Style uses the self-reflexivity of the biopic to
reassert a more explicitly decentralized vision of artistic production
centered on hip-hop culture, which culminates with the Amphitheater
scene at the end of the film. At the same time it is hard not to read
the dramatic force of the film centered on Raymond/Zoros fraught
relationship between the unalienated but illegal nature of street art and
the hopes of being compensated for doing graffiti on canvas for the
downtown gallery scene as the place where Wild Style returns us to the
ambivalence and concerns with creative labor (Figure 5.2a). While Wild
Style is set in the late 1970s, the films opening shot already conveys a
sense of nostalgia about graffiti art. As the film fades in we see a mural
with the phrase Graffiti 1990 in block letters and eventually our main
character Zoro begins his slow decent into what we soon find out is a
train yard. Barely noticeable near the top of the camera frame we see the
phrase For Old Times hovering over Zoro (Figure 5.2b). Public graffiti
was a threatened form of art long before Wild Style was put into produc-
tion. A drastic transformation in how New York Citys public sphere
was taking place, beginning with the consolidation of New York Citys
public transportation system into the Metropolitan Transit Authority in
1969 and continuing into the first official war on graffiti initiated by
Mayor John Lindsay. This expansion of the citys bureaucracy in part
allowed for the surveillance, discipline and punishment of graffiti writ-
ers through heightened criminalization and prosecution. Criminalizing
graffiti coincided with the emergence in New York Citys political
(a) (b)
Figure 5.2 The opening shots of Charlie Ahearns Wild Style establish nostalgia
for graffitis past. Later, Zoro grapples its post-graffiti present
discourse of quality of life issues, which began in the 1970s around

the surveillance and crack down on graffiti writing and was intimately
connected to the gentrification of the Lower East Side.
New Yorks City Hall was not the only threat to the public nature of
graffiti art in the late 1970s and early 80s. There is little question that
graffiti artists crystallized the radical and political potentiality of street
art through their willful appropriation of public spaces and existence
outside of market forces and state authority. The styles associated with
graffiti writing would define some of the most well-known artists and
highly valued art works to emerge out of the alternative art world.
While graffiti transformed the expectations of public art (Schwartzman
1985), graffitis lack of broad gallery success and institutional ratifi-
cation has obscured its historical significance to the history of the
collective arts (Moore, 2007, p. 330). Instead, the history of graffiti art
has been told through its evolution into commercial art (Adams et al.
2006). Despite the incredible celebrity and success of Keith Herring and
Basquiat the move of graffiti into the gallery space called into question
its inherently public and political nature. In 1983, the same year Wild
Style made its debut in the United States the first Post-Graffiti sympo-
sium was held at the Sidney Janis Gallery featuring the work of many of
the graffiti artists who appear in Wild Style. Wild Style imagines hip-hop
as a collective, symbolically brought together by Zoros art, and the film,
which was shot without a city permit, is itself a radical act of collective
public art brought together by Ahearn. Yet, we also leave the film with
Zoros dilemma unresolved, although history would prove that the
space for politicized public art, already shrinking by the time Wild Style
was released, would quickly evaporate in New York City.
Post-Graffiti
It did not very take long for commercial films to quickly follow the
success of Wild Style. Canon Pictures released a cycle of hip-hop films
including (1984) Breakin and Breakin II: Electric Boogaloo (1984) and
Rappin (1985). Warner Brothers added to this early 1980s cycle when
they released Stan Lathans Beat Street (1984) and Krush Groove (1985).
Krush Grooves importance in this corpus of early films cannot be over-
estimated. While it only grossed $4 million domestically compared to
the $36 million Breakin earned the year before, Krush Groove was released
just as rap music began to dominate conceptions of what defined hip-hop
culture. The historic viability of music and, in particular, American music,
as a tradable and easily consumable market commodity on a global scale
98 Richard Purcell
explains why rap won out over the ambivalent cultural legitimacy of
graffiti as well as what was incorrectly understood as the faddish nature
of breakdancing. The growing dominance of rap music was tied as
much to its undeniable aesthetic novelty as it was to the serendipity
of raps emergence during the consolidation of corporate media and
entertainment companies on a global scale. For the film industry, this
same period of the 1970s and 80s brought a renewed interest in creating
marketing synergy around their products. Movie soundtracks, 12-inch
singles, pay for play, music videos and other forays into music and radio
allowed Hollywood studios to extend the pop culture presence of their
films (Wyatt, 1994).
In retrospect, Schultzs Krush Groove was positioned between two bur-
geoning corporate cultures: the triumph of Hollywood high-concept
blockbuster cinema as well as the simultaneous corporate codifica-
tion of music as the face of hip-hop culture. Krush Groove is for all
intents and purposes a biopic, albeit a semi-fictional one about Russell
Simmons and Def Jam Recordings grass roots emergence into what is
now a multi-billion dollar media and music company. Like most early
hip-hop films, Krush Groove stars many of the early 1980s most vis-
ible hip-hop cultural icons: Run DMC, The Beastie Boys, Dr. Jeckel and
Mr. Hyde, L.L. Cool J, and the Fat Boys. Krush Grooves cast is noteworthy
because, not unlike studio era films, it primarily features musical acts
signed to Def-Jam Recordings. The most prescient feature of Schultzs
film is the absence of the other elements of hip-hop culture, which
in spite of the popularity of breakdancing and the fine arts legitimacy
of graffiti art, gave viewers a glimpse of hip-hops music dominated
future. While exalting the value of self-expression, family loyalty and
grass-roots, multiracial entrepreneurship, Krush Groove reveals that the
image, the voice, and the family are absorbed within the horizontal
organization of the multimedia corporation; versus the decentralized
if still fraught organization of creative labor in Downtown 81 and Wild
Style. In the credit sequence we can see the way Krush Grove constructs
a visual space that reflects an already commodified listening space.
The credits combine extreme long shots, slow tracks and pans that
cut between distinctive tourist landmarks like the Manhattan Bridge,
United Nations and Empire State Building and perhaps less than recog-
nizable buildings above 125th Street in Harlem (Figure 5.3). The images
in these shots straddle the line between the recognizable and nonde-
script, public and the private spaces, that give us a rather generic rep-
resentation of Manhattans skyline. To many this is New York City, or
what Manhattan has been turned into after the enormous changes in
the public sphere through slum clearance programs and the restructur-
ing of Midtown and the Lower East Side by the state and private capi-
tal in the 1970s and 80s. Media campaigns like Mayor Edward Kochs
I Love New York, were devised to bring private capital investment
back into New York City during the immense fiscal and social crisis it
endured during these two decades.
The next scene cuts to an interior shot of a recording studio where
Run-DMC are recording their 1985, hit King of Rock (Figure 5.4a).
This self-reflexive moment in the studio is the beginning of a series of
scenes that blurs the line between the non-diegetic soundtrack music
and the diegetic production of Run-DMCs song. Non-diegetic music is
assumed to be a finished product of post-production yet the supposedly
spontaneous musical performance by Run-DMC is in fact lip-synched
as we can hear postproduction effects like echoes and multi-tracked
ad-libs. As the scene unfolds, Run-DMCs studio rehearsal becomes the
soundtrack for the film, leaping between diegetic and non-diegetic realms
of signification and reception. Like the already corporatized version of
Manhattans skyline in the credit sequence, Run-DMCs lip-synched
Figure 5.3 The credit sequence of Michael Schultzs Krush Groove are filled with
iconic images of Manhattan, like this shot of the United Nations as well as the
postmodern 1 United Nations Plaza
100 Richard Purcell
performance of King of Rock is a ready-made musical commodity.

Not only do we see their studio performance get pressed into vinyl LPs
for distribution (Figure 5.4b), but this sequence which ends with Run-
DMC performing King of Rock at The Dixie nightclub for audience
consumption (Figure 5.4c).
Borrowing from the generic conventions of the Hollywood musical,
the biopic and the high-concept film, Krush Groove, Breakin and Beat
Street drag these commercially produced narratives of entertainment
from the Hollywood studio era into the cutting edge realm of hip-hop
culture. The focus on music generates sonically post-produced spaces
for consumption. Krush Groove does this with sound and image, but also
through its storys conflation of familial obligation with corporate struc-
turing and success. Within the context of Manhattans gentrification
the cinematic production of a similarly corporatized space is troubling
indeed. Even the Harry Belafonte produced Beat Street, which is an
attempt to take seriously the breadth of hip-hop culture and its early
associations with black and Latino youth activism, ends where Krush
Groove begins; by positioning hip-hops musical performance as an
already post-produced product that obscures the labor that went into
it. It is fitting that in Beat Street we symbolically see the death of graffiti
when rival graffiti artists Ramon and Spit die violently while fighting
over their subway art. While Beat Street does not necessarily demonize
graffiti writing, Ramons character is constantly dissuaded from graffiti
writing and told to be a man, by giving up his life of writing in favor
of something that will support his family in the South Bronx.
After Krush Groove the terrain of hip-hop culture and cinema changed
drastically. By the late 1980s a new relationship was forged between
smaller record labels and larger entertainment conglomerates. Small
labels were able to keep their independence but were ultimately absorbed
by larger media corporations. This restructuring allowed for the emer-
gence of niche marketing in both the music and film industry. It was in
the 1990s that rap music videos as well as films, influenced by hip-hop
and starring hip-hop artists, really began to flourish. Music videos, as
Tricia Rose writes, were an avenue for artists to animate hip-hop cul-
tural styles and aesthetics (Rose, 1994, p. 9). The same could be said
for the feature-length films made in the late 1980s and 1990s. Directors
like Spike Lee, Ernest Dickerson, John Singleton, Hype Williams, the
Hughes Brothers, Reginald Hudlin and many others who grew up with
hip-hop drew from its style and music in the early 1990s, with films like
Boyz n the Hood (1991), Menace II Society (1993), New Jack City (1991),
Dead Presidents (1995) and Juice (1992). One of the most unique genres to
(a) (b) (c)
Figure 5.4 The assembly line of musical post-production in Michael Schultzs Krush Groove (1985)
101
102 Richard Purcell
emerge in the late 1990s were self-financed, straight to video films by

artists like Master P and Jay-Z such as Im Bout It (1997) Da Last Don
(1998), and Streets Is Watching (1998), a trend that has extended well
into the 21st century. Instead of producing a soundtrack to support a
film these self-financed, low budget, independent movies are feature
length films that support album releases. To a certain extent these
films are highly evolved forms of the musical commodity, an interest-
ing reversal of the high concept strategy as well as the authenticating
discourse of the biopic. While these films extend the aura of the artist
into the cinematic realm, it is the album that is the seat of authority,
not the revelations of unalienated labor and value that the biopic offers.
With the 2009 release of Notorious, George Tillmans take on the life
and tragic death of Christopher Wallace, we see a return of the conven-
tional musical biopic in hip-hop cinema. Adapted from Cheo Hodari
Cokers biography, Notorious follows many of the generic narrative and
visual conventions found in recent 21st century biopics particularly
those about musicians. Christopher Wallace was one of the most tal-
ented and complex figures in rap music, yet Notorious is an incredibly
conventional genre film, released at the tail end of Hollywoods biop-
ics boom that featured 8-Mile (2002), Ray (2004), Walk the Line (2005),
50-Cents Get Rich or Die Trying (2005) and Craig Brewers Hustle and
Flow (2005). Like Krush Groove, Notorious presents a grass-roots narrative
of Bad Boy Records as a conflation of familial obligation with corpo-
rate structure and success. Tillmans biopic indulges in some nostalgic
images of unalienated hip-hop labor in the mise en scne but most
forcefully invokes the conventions of the self-reflexive biopic though
its direct homage to Krush Groove. We especially see this in an early
montage sequence where Christopher Notorious B.I.G. Wallace, like
Run-DMC in Krush Groove, gives us a spontaneous studio performance of
one of B.I.G.s biggest hits Juicy. Like its Krush Groove source material,
the studio version of Juicy ends up providing the soundtrack for the
assembly line of artistic and industrial labor (Figures 5.5a and b) that
ends with the release of Notorious B.I.Gs first album, Ready to Die, in a
lavish album release party that fills a cavernous music club.
There are subtle but important differences between the Notorious and
Krush Groove sequences that suggest how Tillmans film and more con-
temporary biopics in general figure creative labor differently. In Krush
Groove, it is stage performance and radio play that legitimate Run-
DMCs status as hit-makers. While the music has already gone through
the process of post-production, the film still presents them and
their single as laboring entities. For Notorious, Tillman went for a bit
more sonic verisimilitude within the diegesis (for instance, there is no

lip-synching in the studio scene). Notorious B.I.G. does take the stage at
the end of this sequence but not to perform a song. Instead he ascends
to be crowned King of Brooklyn by his manager Sean Puffy Combs
and in one of the last shots of this sequence we find him on his throne
taking in the revelers and fans around him. The same assembly line of
production does not end with traditional stage performance but instead
with scenography. Notorious B.I.G., unlike Run-DMC, does not have to
legitimate himself through performing Juicy. We are in an era where
intimacy with music, cinema and the biographical self are a function of
networked instantaneity (Sheehan, 2014). In Notorious this is reflected
in the cigar smoking image of Notorious B.I.G. that ends this sequence.
There is a tacit understanding here that the artists body is always pre-
sent and at work; an object of both consumption and production even
in leisurely repose (Figure 5.5c).
Coda: The Artist Is (Ever) Present
There has been growing backlash against the corporate cooptation of con-
cepts that for all intents and purposes have long been associated with the
arts. Since the late 1990s economists and sociologists have turned their
interest to creativity as well as the revolutionary rearrangement of corpo-
rate workplaces and management styles around collectivism. The aspect
that most of us experience is the centrality of Web 2.0 in providing a
platform to create affect and aggregate our life practices in order to gener-
ate surplus value. All of these significant changes to culture and political
economy can and have been categorized under the socioeconomic and
political conditions of neoliberalism. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello
point out, we must acknowledge the role that the post-68 emphasis on
blurring the line between aesthetics and politics had on the rise of this
new spirit of capitalism; one that celebrates the sort of deviance and
eccentricity that we usually associate with artistic avant gardes (Boltanski
and Chiapello, 2007). Perhaps it goes without saying that the present
revival of collectivism and those who champion its profit-driven virtues
have excised or perhaps have little idea of the radical roots of these
concepts. Those artists, scholars and cultural critics who have responded
to this commodification have not. For every work of willful historical
amnesia there are plenty that recall the relationship between collectiv-
ism, radical anti-capitalism and the arts. This history has been critical in
understanding how the dark matter of our collective surplus labor has
long been a part of the new economy (Sholette, 2011).
104
(a) (b) (c)
Figure 5.5 George Tillmans assembly line homage to Krush Grove ends with a different kind of performance for the artistic self
in Notorious (2009)
In a broader sense I hope to add to the current scholarly interest in col-

lectivism as well as address what I see as the absence of hip-hop culture
in this recent scholarship, especially amongst scholars who have sought
to draw connections between collectivism, labor and music (Stahl, 2013).
Collectives, like in much of the art world, are a critical part of hip-hop.
Some of these represent themselves along lines that invoke the more
politically radical roots of some versions of collectivism. More often than
not the number of collectives in hip-hop represent a wide array of self-
organized entities invoking anything from geographic locations, criminal,
anarchic, post-secular, agrarian, or labor unions to more vertical modes
of corporate organization. It is precisely because of these contradictions,
which of course are not generalizable throughout the history of hip-hop
nor its discreet artistic elements, that I feel hip-hop has much to offer our
contemporary interest in collectivism, music, and artistic labor. Hip-hop
perhaps along with Punk and No Wave is one of the few musical and,
more generally speaking, artistic movements that put collectives and the
myths of unalienated artistic labor in the forefront of its art. I suspect
that what complicates hip-hops inclusion in our more contemporary
discussions of collectivism and creative labor has much to do with two
important elements within hip-hop. The first is what many perceive as
hip-hops hyper-entrepreneurial ethos, which in some respects runs coun-
ter to the anti-capitalist politics underlying the history of collectivism in
the arts (Kelley, 1998 and Neal, 2001). Secondly, as Okwui Enwezor writes,
the history of collectivism in the arts was, in part, a challenge to modern-
isms fetishization of the work of art as the unique object of individual
creativity (Enwezor, 2007, p. 223). Again, hip-hop, but especially rap
music, derives an incredible amount of legitimacy and authenticity of the
author over and against the political and aesthetic legacies carried by the
aura surrounding both. There should be little surprise that hip-hop artists
have held on so tightly to the author function; especially given the long
American history of love and theft between African American artists and
mainstream American popular culture. The importance of the author
is rooted in a crucial socio-political context for black and Latino artists,
many of whom had been long written out of the neoliberal political and
cultural economy beyond their existence as surplus labor. This point is not
without its complications either. The kind of ethnographic realism that
has been long conferred to rap music (and hip-hop in general) has led to
versions of black authenticity that have standardized blackness within the
cinematic and musical marketplace.
In this essay I have been less interested in making any definitive
claims about genre or cycle within cinema then using a discussion of
106 Richard Purcell
genre as a way to illuminate the relationship between race, culture,

capitalism and the processes of subject making in the late 20th and
21st centuries. The artist biopic, I believe, can be useful in this regard.
If we contextualize these films within the aesthetic conventions of
hip-hop culture, we find that this genre long stood in plain sight. The
crucial relationship that biographical authenticity feigned or other-
wise has to the aesthetics, politics and (problematically) successful
commercial marketing of hip-hop can be seen as early as Downtown 81.
The authenticating power of urban representation of blackness becomes
much more the case once rap music becomes the dominant face of hip-
hop culture. It goes without saying that the bios plays a central role to
the kinds of narratives found in hip-hop music. The same can be said
about the way hip-hop and its artists have been represented as well as
have chosen to represent themselves cinematically. Unlike the biopics
produced during the height of the studio era these post-studio system
films are either portraits of flawed genius or vexed creative labor, with
the two often being synonymous. However, like the post-World War II
musical biopic, these tragic geniuses find moral redemption as well as
renewed commercial success through the production of the musical
and cinematic commodity. Focused as they are on entertainers and
entertainment, the 21st century biopic is as much an indication of our
cultural obsession with artistry and celebrity as it is a genre through
which we can see the continued evolution of the post-studio system.
Downtown 81 and Wild Style suggest the importance hip-hop and No
Wave have in helping us chart a cinematic history of our 21st century
concerns over the exploitative deployment of creativity within neolib-
eralism. Many of these early films represent hip-hops early relationship
with New York Citys downtown pop and high-art culture, which as of
late stands in as the ideal image of artist experimentation and freedom.
In the last few years hip-hop has become nostalgic for this supposed
past. We need only to look at Jay-Zs performance art film Picasso
Baby; a direct homage to Marina Abramovic, Basquiat and Picasso. Or
we can point to Wu-Tang Clans decision to release one fine-art gal-
lery copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to see as indicative that for
many established hip-hop musicians, the system (and figures) of mon-
etary and aesthetic value found in high-art gallery culture is seen as a
corrective to the radical devaluation of the labor put into music making.
What I hope has become clear is that this nostalgia is not well placed.
In fact we can see Wild Styles own sense of nostalgia about the artistic
past and uncertainty about the present and future in the very first shot
of the film.
If, as Giles Deleuze suggests, a visit to the factory with its rigid disci-
pline has become ideal entertainment in the late 20th century these
early films both critique and reify the development of the corporate
musical commodity in the late 20th century (Deleuze 1995, p. 72). Is
cinema the ideal avenue for such a critique? I think the late works of
Deleuze provide us with a possible answer to the use of cinema. Found
throughout his interviews and occasional essays from the late 1970s
to 80s we can see Deleuzes mixture of concern and hope over the
rise of television and video. His most extensive and lucid comments
on the role of cinema in an age of newer media come in Letter to
Serge Daney, his introduction to Daneys Cine-Journal (Daney, 1986).
Cinema, Deleuze tells us, is unique precisely because it has the potential
to create a supplement to nature by either beautifying or spiritual-
izing it (Deleuze, 1986, p. 73). Before we accuse him of returning us to
the romanticist aesthetics of Sir Philip Sidney, Deleuze reminds us of the
important intellectual and historical function this supplement provides.
The cinematic image preserves events but they are always out of step
with things, because cinematic time isnt a time that flows on but one
that endures and coexists with other times (Deleuze, 1986, p. 74). The
aesthetic dimension of cinema reveals this coexistence to us and it is
there that a change in human thinking can hopefully take place, where
new paths of possibility open up for imagining human existence.
Wild Style, Krush Groove and finally more contemporary biopics like
Notorious demonstrate a variety of paths that force us to reconsider
the history of the biopic. It would be easy to read these hip-hop films
as remedying the historic absence of African Americans in the biopic
genre or appropriating the syntax and vocabulary of biopics in order to
subvert them (Bingham 2010, p. 176). Instead of these politics of repre-
sentation I suggest that, given the staggering level of post-studio media
consolidation and high-concept cinema in the 21st century, hip-hops
biopics reveal something about how we conceptualize the creative sub-
ject in the late 20th and 21st century. Films like Downtown 81 and Wild
Style complicate the redemptive narrative of the biopic. I wonder if this
has something to do with how they were produced. Both Downtown 81
and Wild Style have ties to and in part use the screen to imagine a decen-
tralized, at times criminal collective artistic labor that is in constant
tension with forces of commodification (Moore, 2007 and Yokobosky,
1996). Despite my claim that hip-hop confers a sense of authenticity
and value to this collectivist vision, these films are surprisingly silent
on race, which was the case with much of the No Wave cinema. On the
other hand, the post-studio turn of Beat Street, Krush Grove and Notorious
108 Richard Purcell
provide the viewer with a fantasy of black political and collective action
within the market place, but in the process elides the profoundly vio-
lent and criminal contradictions of race, labor and advanced capitalism
that hip-hop often willfully foregrounds.
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Jolson Sings Again. (1949) Film. Directed by Henry Levin. [DVD] USA: Sony
Pictures Home Entertainment.
Juice. (1992). Film. Directed by Ernest Dickerson. [DVD] USA: Warner Brothers
Home Entertainment.
Krush Groove. (1985) Film. Directed by Michael Schultz. [DVD] USA: Warner
Home Video.
Menace II Society. (1993) Film. Directed by Albert and Allen Hughes. [DVD] USA:
New Line Home Cinema.
New Jack City. (1991). Film. Directed by Mario Van Peebles. [DVD] USA: Warner
Home Video.
Notorious. (2009). Film. Directed by George Tillman. [DVD] USA: Fox Searchlight.
Rappin. (1985) Film. Directed by Joel Silberg. [DVD] USA: MGM Home Entertainment.
Ray (2004). Film. Directed by Taylor Hackford. [DVD] USA: Universal Studios.
Shes Gotta Have It. (1986) Film. Directed by Spike Lee. [DVD] USA: MGM.
Singing in the Rain. (1952) Film. Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen.
[DVD] USA: Warner Home Video.
Smithereens. (1981) Film. Directed by Susan Seidleman. [DVD] USA: Blue Underground.
Stations of the Elevated. (1981) Film. Directed by Manfred Kirchheimer. [VHS] USA:
First Run Features.
Streets Is Watching. (1998) Film. Directed by Abdul Malik Abbot. [DVD] USA:
Roc-A-Fella Films.
Style Wars. (1983) Film. Directed by Tony Silver. [DVD] USA: Public Art Films.
The Band Wagon. (1953) Film. Directed by Richard Schickel and Vincente
Minnelli. [DVD] USA: Warner Home Video.
The Brooklyn Bridge at Pearl Street (1978?). Film. Directed by Charlie Ahearn.
112 Richard Purcell
The Deadly Art of Survival (1979). Film. Directed by Charlie Ahearn. [DVD] USA:
BRINKDVD.
They Eat Scum. (1979) Film. Directed by Nick Zedd.
Tougher than Leather. (1988) Film. Directed by Rick Rubin. [VHS] USA: New Line
Home Cinema.
Twins (1980). Film. Directed by Charlie Ahearn.
Underground U.S.A. (1980) Film. Directed by Eric Mitchell.
Walk the Line (2005). Film. Directed by James Mangold. [DVD] USA: 20th
Century Fox.
Wild Style. (1982) Film. Directed by Charlie Ahearn. [DVD] USA: Rhino Films.
6
Love Streams1
Damon Krukowski
Making Cents
Im sure each generation of musicians feels theyve lived through a time

of tremendous change, but the shifts Ive witnessed in my relatively
short music career from morphing formats to dissolving business
models do seem extraordinary. The first album I made was originally
released on LP only, in 1988 and my next will likely only be pressed
on LP again. But in between, the music industry seems to have done
everything it could to screw up that simple model of exchange; today it
is no longer possible for most of us to earn even a modest wage through
our recordings.
Not that I am naively nostalgic for the old days we werent paid for
that first album, either. (The record label we were signed to at the time,
Rough Trade, declared bankruptcy before cutting us even one royalty
check.) But the ways in which musicians are screwed have changed
qualitatively, from individualized swindles to systemic ones. And with
those changes, a potential end-run around the industrys problems
seems less and less possible, even for bands who have managed to hold
on to 100 percent of their rights and royalties, as we have.
Consider Pandora and Spotify, the streaming music services that are
becoming ever more integrated into our daily listening habits. My BMI
royalty check arrived recently, reporting songwriting earnings from the
first quarter of 2012, and I was glad to see that our music is being listened
to via these services. Galaxie 500s Tugboat, for example, was played
7,800 times on Pandora that quarter, for which its three songwriters
were paid a collective total of 21 cents, or seven cents each. Spotify pays
better: For the 5,960 times Tugboat was played there, Galaxie 500s
songwriters went collectively into triple digits: $1.05 (35 cents each).
113
114 Damon Krukowski
To put this into perspective: Since we own our own recordings, by

my calculation it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000
plays on Pandora to earn us the profit of one one LP sale. (On Spotify,
one LP is equivalent to 47,680 plays.)
Or to put it in historical perspective: The Tugboat 7-inch single,
Galaxie 500s very first release, cost us $980.22 for 1,000 copies
including shipping! (Naomi kept the receipts) or 98 cents each. I no
longer remember what we sold them for, but obviously it was easy to
turn at least a couple bucks profit on each. Which means we earned
more from every one of those 7-inch singles we sold than from the
songs recent 13,760 plays on Pandora and Spotify. Heres yet another
way to look at it: Pressing 1,000 singles in 1988 gave us the earning
potential of more than 13 million streams in 2012 (And people say the
internet is a bonanza for young bands...).
To be fair, because we are singer-songwriters, and because we own all
of our rights, these streaming services end up paying us a second royalty,
each for a different reason and each through a different channel. Pandora
is considered non-terrestrial radio, and consequently must pay the
musicians who play on the recordings it streams, as well as the song-
writers. These musicians royalties are collected by SoundExchange, a
non-profit organization created by the government when satellite radio
came into existence. SoundExchange doesnt break our earnings down
by service per song, but it does tell us that last quarter, Pandora paid a
total of $64.17 for use of the entire Galaxie 500 catalogue. We have 64
Galaxie 500 recordings registered with them, so that averages neatly to
one dollar per track, or another 33 cents for each member of the trio.
Pandora in fact considers this additional musicians royalty an extra-
ordinary financial burden, and they are aggressively lobbying for a
new law it is now a bill before the U.S. Congress designed to relieve
them of it. You can read all about it in a series of helpful blog posts by
Ben Sisario of The New York Times,2 or if you prefer your propaganda
unmediated, you can listen to Pandora founder Tim Westergrens own
explanation of the Orwellian Internet Radio Fairness Act.3
As for Spotify, since it is not considered radio, either of this world
or any other, they have a different additional royalty to pay. Like
any non-broadcast use of recordings, they require a license from the
rights-holder. They negotiate this individually with each record label,
at terms not made public. Im happy to make ours public, however: It
is the going indie rate of $0.005 per play. (Actually, when I do the
math, that rate seems to truly pay out at $0.004611 I hope someone
got a bonus for saving the company four-hundredths of a cent on each
Love Streams 115
stream!) We didnt negotiate this, exactly; for a band-owned label like

ours, its take it or leave it. We took it, which means for 5,960 plays of
Tugboat, Spotify theoretically owes our record label $29.80.
I say theoretically, because in practice Spotifys $0.004611 rate turns
out to have a lot of small, invisible print attached to it. It seems this rate
is adjusted for each stream, according to an algorithm (not shared by
Spotify, at least not with us) that factors in variables such as frequency of
play, the outlet that channeled the play to Spotify, the type of subscrip-
tion held by the user, and so on. Whats more, try as I might through
the documents available to us, I cannot get the number of plays Spotify
reports to our record label to equal the number of plays reported by BMI.
Bottom line: The payments actually received by our label from Spotify
for streams of Tugboat in that same quarter, as best I can figure: $9.18.
Well, thats still not bad, you might say. (Im not sure who would
really say that, but lets presume someone might.) After all, these are
immaterial goods it costs us nothing to have our music on these ser-
vices: no pressing, no printing, no shipping, no file space to save a paper
receipt for 25 years. All true. But immaterial goods turn out to generate
equally immaterial income.
Which gets to the heart of the problem. When I started making records,
the model of economic exchange was exceedingly simple: make some-
thing, price it for more than it costs to manufacture, and sell it if you can.
It was industrial capitalism, on a 7-inch scale. The model now seems closer
to financial speculation. Pandora and Spotify are not selling goods; they
are selling access, a piece of the action. Sign on, and well all benefit. (Im
struck by the way that even crowd-sourcing mimics this investment
model of contemporary capitalism: You buy in to what doesnt yet exist.)
But heres the rub: Pandora and Spotify are not earning any income
from their services, either. In the first quarter of 2012, Pandora the
same company that paid Galaxie 500 a total of $1.21 for their use of
Tugboat reported a net loss of more than $20 million. As for Spotify,
their latest annual report revealed a loss in 2011 of $56 million.
Leaving aside why these companies are bothering to chisel hundredths
of a cent from already ridiculously low royalties, or paying lobby-
ists to work a bill through Congress that would lower those rates even
further lets instead ask a question they themselves might consider
relevant: Why are they in business at all?
The answer is capital, which is what Pandora and Spotify have and
what they generate. These arent record companies; they dont make
records, or anything else apparently not even income. They exist to
attract speculative capital. And for those who have a claim to ownership
116 Damon Krukowski
of that capital, they are earning millions in 2012, Pandoras executives

sold $63 million of personal stock in the company. Or as Spotifys CEO
Daniel Ek has put it, The question of when well be profitable actually
feels irrelevant. Our focus is all on growth. That is priority one, two,
three, four and five.4
Growth of the music business? I think not. Daniel Ek means growth of
his company, that is, its capitalization. Which is the closest I can come to
understanding the fundamental change Ive witnessed in the music indus-
try, from my first LP in 1988 to the one I am working on now. In between,
the sale of recorded music has become irrelevant to the dominant busi-
ness models I have to contend with as a working musician. Indeed, music
itself seems to be irrelevant to these businesses it is just another form of
information, the same as any other that might entice us to click a link.
As businesses, Pandora and Spotify are divorced from music. To me,
its a short logical step to observe that they are doing nothing for the
business of music except undermining the simple cottage industry of
pressing ideas onto vinyl, and selling them for more than they cost to
manufacture. I am no Luddite I am not smashing iPhones or sabo-
taging software. In fact, I subscribe to Spotify for $9.99 a month (the
equivalent of 680,462 annual plays of Tugboat) because I love music,
and the access it gives me to music of all kinds is incredible.
But I have simply stopped looking to these business models to do any-
thing for me financially as a musician. As for sharing our music without
a business model of any kind, thats exactly how I got into this we
called it punk rock. Which is why we are streaming all of our recordings,
completely free, on the Bandcamp sites we set up for Galaxie 500 and
Damon & Naomi.
Which leads to the following modest proposal.
Free Music
The last thing I expected to see crop up in accounts of WikiLeaks whistle-

blower Bradley Mannings ongoing trial was mention of our petty
problems in the music business.
But lo and behold, when the defense called an expert to testify on the
relationship between WikiLeaks and the traditional media in order to
introduce the idea that the controversial site might deserve protection of
free speech, just like the newspapers that published its revelations the
witness began by comparing the current situation in journalism to what
we saw in music in the early 2000s (Freedom of the Press Foundation,
2013) . Yochai Benkler, professor of law at Harvard and author of an
Love Streams 117
influential paper about journalism called A Free Irresponsible Press:

Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate
argues that, in the 21st century, the function of the press has expanded
beyond 20th-century media outlets of print, radio, and television, to a
cluster of practices and technologies and organizations that fill that
role, which he calls the network Fourth Estate (Benkler, 2011, p. 311).
The court transcript itself is evidence for what Benkler is describing:
Its provided not by the state, nor by a traditional media outlet, but
by the non-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation, which has raised
more than $100,000 through crowdsourcing to pay for a stenographer.
Manning is on trial in a military court, which is not required to keep a
record of the proceedings, so Freedom of the Press Foundation is post-
ing full transcripts from the trial, which are being released under an
Attribution 3.0 Unported Creative Commons license.
Follow that link to Creative Commons, and youll find yourself
enmeshed with music yet again: The Freedom of the Press Foundation is
using a license developed with music so much in mind that one of its
three terms is the right to Remix. Indeed, diligent readers of Pitchfork
might remember that, among others, Nine Inch Nails used a Creative
Commons license instead of Copyright for their 2008 album Ghosts I-IV
(it didnt help reviewer Tom Breihan like it any better, though). How did
musicians and music fans end up entangled with momentous problems
like the leaking of government secrets, freedom of the press, and the
potential prosecution of whistleblowers as traitors?
As Benkler indicates in his testimony, music was the canary in the
digital coal mine. In its original free, peer-to-peer form, Napster lasted
only two years, from June 1999 to July 2001, but left a changed industry
in its wake, and all the many legal and financial and creative ideas since
cannot turn back the century. But if music preceded movies, television,
books, and journalism down the rabbit hole of peer-to-peer exchange,
Benkler reminds us that it wasnt the first industry to be shaken by fast
and cheap digital communication. That distinction belongs to software,
which lost its original way of doing business even earlier.
In his article, Benkler looks to developments in the software industry
to point the way for journalism in its new, networked form, and it might
serve the music business to do the same. As Benkler puts it, The defining
characteristic of the Net was the decentralization of physical and human
capital that it enabled (374). In programming, that decentralization
led not only to the creation of open-source software, but to its rapid
development in ways that centralized, hierarchical businesses could not
necessarily match. Their solution? Software companies developed ways
118 Damon Krukowski
of using and complementing open-source material, rather than playing

whack-a-mole and trying to shut it down. As Benkler puts it, what has
emerged in computing is a collaboration across the boundary between
traditional organizational models and new networked models (395).
Though many have tried, we havent really seen this strategy employed
in the realm of music. Instead, what seems to have emerged most
powerfully for the industry is cooperation between major labels the
epitome of centralized, hierarchical business models and the comput-
ing industry (Apple, Spotify, Pandora). Whats missing from that is the
very element that Benkler identifies as the defining characteristic of the
Net: decentralized physical and human capital, that is, musicians and
music fans. Somehow, we keep being left out of the equation.
As others have commented most recently Thom Yorke and Nigel
Godrich these new models are adept at wringing profits from existing
music catalogs, but they dont do much, if anything, for the financing of
new recordings. And it doesnt take an MBA to see how that doesnt bode
well for the future of the industry. But it must be said: Major labels dont
exactly have a great track record for planning ahead. (Is it something about
the personalities drawn to work in our moment-to-moment world of music?
If you get a thrill from Jonathan Richmans one-two-three-four-five-six!
are you more likely to be someone who saves carefully for retirement, or
someone who hopes they die before they get old?)
What might be keeping the music industry from developing success-
ful new networked models is the centralized holding of a majority of
existing music rights in the hands of a very few. Apple, Spotify, Pandora,
and all those to come in their wake have only to negotiate with the
major labels before launching products that the rest of us have to
accept or reject. Using Benklers terminology, the networked models
in music have been relegated to a put-up-or-shut-up role, while the
traditional organizational models explore their options with partners
from outside music altogether.
A true 21st-century partnership for the music business would include
musicians and music fans in a far more substantive role. Creating these
collaborations is feasible but not trivial, Benkler acknowledges (395).
There are entrenched interests that resist open-source sharing, and on
the networked side there might be resistance to cooperating with what
can seem like the enemy. But he points out the advantages to both sides:
The major incumbents will continue to play an important role as

highly visible, relatively closed organizations capable of delivering
much wider attention to any given revelation, and to carry on their
Love Streams 119
operations under relatively controlled conditions. The networked

entrants, not individually, but as a network of diverse individuals
and organizations, will have an agility, scope, and diversity of sources
and pathways such that they will, collectively, be able to collect and
capture information on a global scale that would be impossible for
any single traditional organization to replicate by itself (Benkler, 396).
Benkler is addressing journalism in this statement, but it is easy to map

the players in music onto this scenario. The major incumbents know
who they are. The network of diverse individuals and organizations
is the rest of us, and our collective abilities in music are tremendous.
Musicians and fans shouldnt trade those abilities for anything less than
transforming the industry in their own image, because if there is to be
a 21st-century music business, it will be a networked one.
One way we could start is to collectively acknowledge that nobody
can really claim digital streams as exclusive property. So let them flow
freely from everyone, fans included instead of only from companies
that have cut deals with the copyright holders. Services like Spotify
might continue to operate as they are, with their pittance of revenue
sharing, but they would have to compete in an open market of free
streaming by musicians and fans. What I am envisioning is something
like what has developed for music posting via YouTube, but allowed
to proliferate throughout the network, without corporate control over
context or quality. Perhaps that kind of competition would spark newly
cooperative ideas, and take us away from the antagonistic relationship
between much of the music business on one hand, and the network of
musicians and fans on the other. The century is still young.
Notes
1. This essay is adapted from articles originally written for and published by the
music website Pitchfork.com in 2012 and 2013. Reproduced with permission.
2. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/author/ben-sisario/?_r=0
3. https://web.archive.org/web/20130308075714/http://www.pandora.com/
static/ads/irfa/irfa.html
4. https://www.dittomusic.com/blog/spotify-founder-states-that-profitability-is-
absolutely-not-a-priority
Reference
Benkler, Y. (2011). Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul
of the Networked Fourth Estate, Harvard Civil RightsCivil Liberties Law Review,
46, 31197.
7
A Case for Musical Privacy
Richard Randall
Singin right to me I can hear the melody

The story is there for the takin
Drivin over Kanan, singin to my soul
Theres people out there turnin music into gold
John Stewart, Gold
If I didnt love you, Id hate you

Im playing your stereogram
Singles remind me of kisses
Albums remind me of plans
Squeeze, If I didnt love you
Every song has a story. Whats yours? read the subject of an email sent to
me by the streaming-music service Spotify (2014a). The email continues:
Spotify
#thatsongwhen
Find a song, tell your story, share with the world.
Nothing triggers a memory quite like a song. You know, that song
when weekend mornings meant sugary cereal and cartoons. Or that
song when you did everything to win the heart of your playground
crush ... So were asking what songs take you back to a special
moment?
Here are some of the songs you played most in 2014:
Give Out by Sharon Van Etten

Serpents by Sharon Van Etten
Leonard by Sharon Van Etten
120
A Case for Musical Privacy 121
Does one of them spark a good story? Wed love to hear it.
Or explore other stories in the gallery.
When I saw this list of songs, I knew exactly when I was listening to them,
where I was, how I felt, what was going on in my life, and how these songs
made me feel. These experiences came back in vivid detail. I probably
listened to the song Give Out (Van Etten, 2012, track 2) over a hundred
times during this period on my MP3 player, on my computer, and appar-
ently on Spotify. When I saw Spotifys request that I share why with them
and the world, I was taken aback. The time in question was emotion-
ally charged and challenging. I felt fragile and disoriented. The song was
an anchor for me. It was a point of reference and a constant companion.
The song made me feel I wasnt alone in a way that was safe, private, and
confidential. To me, sharing the details of this experience would be on par
with sharing a private conversation with a therapist or a trusted friend.
While this story might seem melodramatic, I share it to highlight
the personal and intimate relationship we have with music. Listening
to music is an important part of our lives and our listening habits say a
lot about who we are, how we feel, and what we believe. Over the past
ten years we have seen an unprecedented transformation in how we
are able to discover and listen to music. Online streaming music ser-
vices such as Spotify and Pandora comprise a complex of technologic,
economic, and critical human issues. Some of these issues are common
to streaming media services in general (e.g. YouTube, Netflix, Hulu)
and the Internet, while others are unique to music services. This essay
examines streaming music services (SMuS) from the perspective of the
listener. Listening to music online is drastically different from offline
listening largely because the economics of online listening create a new
model of the audience commodity and raise critical privacy issues.
The economics of SMuS have been discussed largely as to whether or not
artists are fairly compensated for their music or how SMuS represent a
new business model for the industry. However, in the context of SMuS,
listening becomes a transaction whereby a users selection labor is con-
verted into a commodity that has exchange-value. Moreover, this essay
explores how selection labor reveals personal information we make
freely available anytime we make a choice that is recorded by a second
party. This essay works to raise awareness of the kinds of transactions
we are engaging in and risks we are exposed to when we listen to music
online and frames musical identities as something worthy of protection.
In order to discuss streaming music services it is important to
understand some background and issues of online digital capitalization.
122 Richard Randall
Web 2.0 describes a set of online technologies and practices in which

users are encouraged and empowered to generate and share content
and make on-demand, selective choices about media consumption
(OReilly, 2007). A large part of the political economy of Web 2.0 can be
summarized by the free labor (Terranova, 2000) duality of prosumption
and surveillance (Fuchs, 2012). Prosumption is the combined activity of
content production and consumption (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010). As
a form of capitalism, prosumption describes how social networking sites
such as Facebook and Twitter work: a Twitter user, for example, produces
tweets for others to consume and this user consumes tweets produced
by others. The mitigating service, in this case Twitter, is free to the user.
In order to make money, however, the service must sell something to
someone. The content each user creates is surveilled, aggregated, ana-
lyzed, and sold to third parties often for the purposes of advertising in a
practice called behavioral targeting (Anderson, 2014). In other words,
the product Twitter sells is both the labor of the user (in the form of
content created to attract and retain other users) and the user (who
receives targeted advertisements). Andrejevic writes that [t]he value
accruing to the privatization of network resources is, at least in part,
dependent upon the ability to extract productive data from its users
data that can serve as a resource for advertisers, employers, political
campaigns, and policing (2012, p. 160).
Sharing personal information is common on online social networks
such as Twitter and Facebook. A social network is an Internet commu-
nity where individuals interact, often through profiles that (re)present
their public persona (and their networks of connections) to others
(Acquisti and Gross, 2006, p. 37). When we participate in these networks,
we have a reasonable understanding of how what we share can be and
will be used.1 For example, sharing information about a recent vaca-
tion will both keep friends and family appraised of your activities and
generate targeted advertisements for future travel opportunities. Social
networks, search engines, and free email services collect and analyze
data ostensibly in order to connect goods and services with consumers
who are most likely to purchase them.2 The information generated by
our online activity in terms of both content and behavior falls into the
category of Big Data. Big Data describes data sets that are so large and
complex that they resist traditional methods of analysis. It is a $50 billion
industry characterized by algorithmic mining techniques that search
for otherwise obscured patterns in human-generated information (Kelly,
2014). The goal is often to establish correlations between various fac-
tors that allow the assertion of probable behaviors of individuals and
groups. Depending on the analytic goals, Big Data can be used to iden-
tify a person as a potential product buyer (behavioral targeting), medical
risk, or terrorist threat. The main ethical issue with Big Data is that digi-
tal prosumers never know how their data will be used. In his critique of
Big Data analytics, Acquisti asks us to:
Imagine a world in which the collection and analysis of individual

health data allow researchers to discover the causes of rare diseases
and the cures for common ones. Now, consider the same world, but
imagine that employers are able to predict job candidates future
health conditions from a few data points extracted from the candi-
dates social network profiles and then, imagine those employers
making hiring decisions based on those predictions, without any
candidates consent or even awareness (2014, p. 76).
Prosumers often acquiesce to data collection by believing that potential

benefits outweigh risks. We will get better user experiences, access to
goods and services we want, and be shielded from things we dont want.
But Acquisti writes that [t]he metaphor of a blank check has been
used to describe the uncertainty associated with privacy costs: disclos-
ing personal information is like signing a blank check, which may never
be cashed in or perhaps cashed in at some unpredictable moment in
time with an indeterminably low, or high, amount to pay (2014, p. 84).
A 2014 New York Times article highlights the issue succinctly. A suicide
prevention group released an app that allowed Twitter users to monitor
the feeds of anyone they follow for key terms that may indicate that a
user is a suicide risk.
A week after the app was introduced on its website, more than 4,000
people had activated it, the Samaritans said, and those users were fol-
lowing nearly 1.9 million Twitter accounts, with no notification to
those being monitored. But just about as quickly, the group faced an
outcry from people who said the app, called Samaritans Radar, could
identify and prey on the emotionally vulnerable the very people
the app was created to protect. (Singer 2014a)
The risks of such a surveillance technology were many. For example,

stalkers could use the app to identify a victims vulnerable moments
and employers could make hiring decisions based on amateur psychi-
atric diagnoses. As one health-care professional pointed out, you can
have sophisticated employment consultants who will do the vetting on
124 Richard Randall
peoples psychiatric states, derived from some cockamamie algorithm,

on your Twitter account (Singer 2014a). The well-meaning app was
withdrawn once it was clear that its possible nefarious implementation
was beyond the control of both the creators and the users being moni-
tored. This example highlights the fact that digital users rarely know
when or how they are at risk. The Samaritan Radar case is important and
unique because the analytic results and means for obtaining them were
explicit and designed to be collected and used by the public. It was a
transparent transgression that met with immediate condemnation. For
proprietary services such as Twitter, Facebook, or Google, however, user
agreements are vague, temporary, and voluminous. We are never fully
aware of what information is being extracted or how it is or will be used.
We are signing a blank check.
For streaming media services (SMeS), how users interact with technol-
ogy and consume and produce content is somewhat different. While
some SMeS, such as YouTube, SoundCloud, MySpace, or Vimeo, allow
users to prosume, other services, such as Spotify and Netflix, do not and
focus on consumption. Netflix users, for example, do not upload their
own content. Revenue is generated by subscriptions to the service
(Netflix) or general advertising (Hulu). The service, therefore, functions
more like traditional cable or broadcast media. For a SMuS like Spotify or
Pandora, users can upload media so long as they can provide evidence
of ownership and agree to the services terms of use. Still, this is similar
to traditional broadcast radio where an individual can send their own
recording to a radio station DJ or program manager for them to con-
sider including in their rotation. Radio station playlists and programs
are intrinsically connected to advertising revenue. The type of music
played at a particular time correlates with likely audience demographics
determined by surveys. These correlations are used to set advertising
rates and sales strategies. This is a classic model of the audience com-
modity described by Dallas Smythe (McGuigan and Manzerolle, 2013).
For Smythe, the raison dtre of radio and TV stations was to create and
tailor programming in order to develop and retain an audience. The
audience becomes a commodity that is sold to advertisers.
There is a crucial difference between broadcast radio and SMuS, how-
ever.3 In the latter, the traditional push design of broadcast radio is
replaced with a pull design where users are able to initiate the delivery
of specific songs and playlists (Trecordi and Verticale, 2000; Kendall and
Kendall, 1999). A detailed explanation of push vs pull is beyond the
scope of this essay, but it is important to point out that the bidirectional
information flow of pull not only facilitated the on demand media
revolution, but also of Web 2.0, itself. With the ability for users to make
requests and initiate delivery, content providers such as Pandora do not
have to create programming for users in the hopes that they will be
able to sell their attention to an advertiser. Instead, users create their
own programming from a library. The catch is that in all pull technolo-
gies, the gateway application, for example Pandora, is also a surveillance
device that directly monitors and records each users behavior.
Online streaming media services have realized that such choices
represent a set of collectable and analyzable behaviors that not only
allow providers to refine their own recommendation algorithms and
marketing strategies, but also to package and resell these behaviors to
third parties. Numerous scholars have critiqued the labor implications
of user-generated content and prosumption (Scholz 2012). But the politi-
cal economic issues associated with making choices about listening and
watching are more subtle. Consuming media has usually been framed as
a leisure activity or unproductive labor, that is, labor that does not pro-
duce a good with exchange value. However, in the case of SMuS, where
listening requires input from a user, behavior resembles something like
the subjective immaterial labor that underpins cognitive capitalism
(Fuchs, 2011). Cognitive capitalism holds that ideas and thoughts can
be commodities with use and exchange value. There is currently exten-
sive global competition to attract the best brains, writes Larsen, and
[k]nowledge becomes a strategic force of production and an important
commodity (2014, p. 161).
Related to this is selection power and selection labor. In his book
Human Information Retrieval, Julian Warner posits that selection power
is the human ability to make informed choices between objects or
representations of objects (2010, p. 17). Warner is referring to how rec-
ommendation algorithms model human behavior. In SMuS, algorithmic
recommendation is a crucial part of the listening experience. Given
a users choice of two songs, for example, an algorithm will choose a
third song that it thinks the user will like. It is important for the algo-
rithm to be correct because that will improve the quality of the users
experience and keep them using the service. The user can affirm or
deny the selection (e.g. thumbs up or thumbs down), which provides the
algorithm with additional information so as to make better decisions in
the future. In the case of recommendation, the results of an informa-
tion retrieval algorithm, at best, will represent the selection power of an
individual or group of individuals. It is a property of human conscious-
ness and represents a variety of human experiences and desires. Selection
power is produced by selection labor, which can be understood as the
126 Richard Randall
mental work of memorization and recall (Warner, 2010, pp. 27 and

31). Psychologically speaking, selection labor would necessarily repre-
sent both tacit and explicit knowledge and is therefore only partially
explicable. Selection labor can be construed as a code for a wide variety
of human experiences. When transformed into selection power, these
experiences produce outcomes that are desirable for a person, but often
not easily predicted by machine. In order for these selection machines
to do what people do, they observe, record, and analyze the behaviors
of the users themselves. It is an interesting twist on the free labor issue.
User input is utilized to build algorithms that enhance the services user
experience by creating a better product. These algorithms are shadowy
versions of our experiences and knowledge expressed as selections we
make actively, but often intuitively. The question is: how important is
this musical experience and knowledge?
Music is often considered entertainment or, as neuroscientist Steven
Pinker (1997) has said, auditory cheesecake, but we know that it is
much more. As a species we have always exhibited distinctly musical
behaviors (Mithen, 2005). We sing and dance, and we do these activities
alone and in groups. We have an innate desire to be musical. As a human
universal, music is arguably central to the development and survival of
our species. Archeologist Steven Mithen (2005) writes that before there
was a spoken language, there was an advanced communication system
involving complex and holistic vocalizations that enabled our ances-
tors to hunt, reproduce, and socialize. It is from this system that both
language and music were borne. Given an opportunity to fade away in
the shadow of languages formidable ability to communicate thoughts
and ideas, music held its ground. The question is: why? One answer is
that music allowed us to do things that were important to us, and for
which language was not particularly well suited. Language, while great
for organizing a hunt, perhaps falls short in expressing the exuberance
that comes with its successful conclusion. The importance of music in
our lives has not changed over the millennia, even if the way we engage
with it has.
Erik Clarke writes that music affords dancing, worship, coordinated
working, persuasion, emotional catharsis, marching, foot-tapping, and
a myriad other activities of a perfectly tangible kind (2005, p. 38).
Challenging ideas that listening and musical experiences are passive,
Joel Krueger argues that music is something we are always seeking.
Music, Krueger writes, is a crucial tool for cultivating and regulating
our social life. Without music, our life including our ability to sensi-
tively relate to and communicate with others would indeed change
dramatically (2011, p.3). These are claims that online social networks
would love to make. The music industry never has to create a demand
for what it sells, as we will never stop wanting and needing to be musical.
They only need to convince us that the product theyre selling and the
way we access it is what we want.
The materialization of music by means of notation and recording has
had a profound influence and effect over musical practice, especially in
capitalist economies. Jacques Attali writes that music, an immaterial
pleasure turned commodity, now heralds a society of the sign, of the
immaterial up for sale, of social relation unified in money (1985, p. 4).
He argues that material physical formats such as LPs, CDs, musical scores,
and piano rolls, allow us to exercise political and financial control over
what music is and how it can be used. Wherever there is music, he
says, there is money (Attali 1985, p. 3).
Streaming music services eschew the notion of materiality altogether.
In its place is the notion of service. These services mediate our access
to music and in doing so are situated in a position to observe how lis-
teners behave. By moving to a service model, companies like Pandora,
Spotify, and Rdio provide access to a limited catalog when you want it,
where you want it. No need to manage an MP3 collection or purchase
and download music. It is pitched as a radio where a user gets to choose
the songs. These services have been widely criticized in recent years for
the small amount of royalties musicians actually make compared to
how frequently their songs get played (Krukowski, Chapter 6 in this
volume). The fact is, these services do not seem to make money. They
have relied on ads and subscriptions to generate revenue and not one
SMuS operating in 2013 made a profit.
When we listen to music on a SMuS, we make choices about what
we want to hear. These choices reflect who we are, how we feel, what
we believe. Our musical tastes have developed over years of personal
reflection and social interactions. We have learned how to use music to
make ourselves feel better and to create social bonds. Christopher Small
coins the term musicking as a verb that describes a diverse collection
of activities that comprise musical engagement (Small 1998). Small pro-
poses that being musical involves not just performing and creating, but
also listening and sharing. Listening is not a capricious activity. In fact,
listening preferences develop over time and reflect important individual
characteristics and social choices that represent who we are.
Natasha Singers article Listen to Pandora, and It Listens Back
describes a new solution to an old problem: how can SMuS make money
from our desire to be musical (2014b). One solution is to commodify
128 Richard Randall
our musical identity as it is defined by the choices we make when we

listen to music online. This is important because most of us dont think
about our musical identity, how important it is, or how much personal
information it potentially represents. Singer relays Pandoras stance that
such data collection and analysis will be used for behaviorally targeted
advertising similar to practices of Twitter and Facebook. She quotes a
Pandora scientist who says, we have [analysis] down to the individual
level, to the specific person who is using Pandora ... [w]e take all of these
signals and look at correlations that lead us to come up with magical
insights about somebody (2014b). Singer writes:
Peoples music, movie or book choices may reveal much more than
commercial likes and dislikes. Certain product or cultural preferences
can give glimpses into consumers political beliefs, religious faith,
sexual orientation or other intimate issues. That means many organi-
zations now are not merely collecting details about where we go and
what we buy, but are also making inferences about who we are (2014b).
There is considerable evidence to support Singers claim. Music psycho-

logists have long found clear evidence that what we listen to can
accurately predict specific personal demographic details and emotional
states. We listen to music for a variety of reasons and how, when, and
what we listen to can reveal a lot about who we are, how we feel, our val-
ues, and our beliefs. MacDonald et al. (2002) contend that music plays a
fundamental role in the development, negotiation, and maintenance of
our personal lives (2002, p. 462). Research also indicates that for young
people music is an important badge of identity that promotes devel-
opment and maintenance of social groups (Hargraves et al., 2002). The
sense of self is a complex psychological construct that develops over
time and is subject to constant revision and modulation. Music plays a
significant role in this development.
A study by North and Hargreaves (2007) found numerous correlations
between subjects musical preference and lifestyle details including
moral and political beliefs, and attitudes about relationships and criminal
behavior. Rentfrow and Gosling (2011) found that musical preference
is the most common topic of conversation when two people are trying
to get to know each other and that people are able to form very accu-
rate assessments of the personality of others based only on knowing
their musical preferences. Rawlings and Ciancarelli (1997) were able to
show clear and distinct associations between gender and personality
types (scales measuring extraversion and openness) and musical styles.
Numerous studies explore and find strong connections between listen-

ers emotional states and musical preferences (Juslin and Sloboda, 2010).
Moreover, Greasley and Lamont (2006) show that the more important
music is to a listener, the stronger these associations are. While results
like these are somewhat intuitive, it is unclear whether or not the aver-
age SMuS listener is aware that such associations are possible. The case
for musical privacy hinges on listeners appreciation and valuation of
their musical identities and how they can prevent personal information
from either being collected against their wishes or being used in ways
they do not want. It is reasonable to expect that loss of a loved one, for
example, may influence the music you listen to. It is also reasonable to
expect that you should be allowed to mourn in private, if you so wish.
Pandoras Privacy Policy is vague about how it uses Listening Activity
information. The relevant section reads:
When you use the Service, we keep track of your listening activity,
which may include the number and title of songs you have listened
to, the songs that you like (thumb up) or dislike (thumb down), the
stations you create or listen to, the number of songs you skip, and
how long you listen to a station (Pandora, 2013).
It does not say that your listening history will be subject to algorithms
and classifiers in an attempt to create personality profiles that can be
sold and used for reasons you never intended. Nor does Pandora say
what they will do with this data, or if personal identities are protected.
Spotify is more detailed and explains what they collect and what they
do with it.
When you use the Service, we automatically collect certain informa-

tion, including: (i) information about your type of subscription and
your interactions with the Service, including with songs, playlists, other
Spotify users, Third Party Applications and advertising, products and
services which are offered, linked to or made available on the Service.
To personalise your experience, we may share some informa-

tion we have collected about you with providers of Third Party
Applications, such as high-level geographic information, your
musical preferences, settings and technical data. However, we take
precautions to prohibit Third Party Application providers from
attempting to identify you by using the information we provide
to them or by collecting additional information without your
consent (Spotify, 2014b).
130 Richard Randall
While this is more reassuring, Spotify is later very clear that they reserve
the right to sell your information.
Consumers have the right to clearly understand how their musical
identities are being used. More importantly, we have the right to opt out
of data collection. While our musical identities may not seem as impor-
tant as social security numbers, health records, or banking information,
they nevertheless deserve protection. As companies like Pandora and
Spotify work to extract, bundle, and sell our information, we need to be
aware of whats at stake.
In her analysis of the Jamaican street dance, Mann invokes two key
concepts: cultural intimacy and the exilic space. Cultural intimacy, Mann
writes, arises from practices that embody both self-knowledge and self-
representation, wherein the self is collectively defined. This intimacy
allows marginalized people to affirm as positive the shared traits, situa-
tions, and actions that are designated negative by broader society (Mann,
forthcoming, p. 4). Cultural intimacy is a set of traits that simultaneously
creates closeness within a marginalized group and distance between this
group and powerful outsiders who pose a threat to the group (Mann,
forthcoming, p. 4). The exilic space allows cultural intimacy by protect-
ing the group from being observed and allowing members to act openly
in a way that promotes intimacy. Mann examines how increased vis-
ibility on globally networked media platforms can harm marginalized
communities and their ability to celebrate their identities through vari-
ous performance practices (Mann, forthcoming, p. 4). She goes on to
say, marginalized people need the power to exclude as much as the
power to include (Mann, forthcoming, p. 4).
I argue that opacity of privacy protections in SMuS creates significant
ambiguity as to what kind of space online listening really is. In the
most dangerous scenario, SMuS listeners might believe they are in an
exilic space and act openly and inclusively as members of a marginal-
ized group. Greater care needs to be taken to ensure that listeners are
aware their behaviors are subject to hegemonic observation with pos-
sible damaging consequences. We need to reframe online listening as
prosumption, meaning that listeners are generating content as they
consume content. This content has exchange-value in that it can be sold,
but more importantly this content has the capacity to reveal highly
personal and identifying information.
Furthermore, making choices about what we listen to is a form of
commodifiable labor for which listeners are not compensated. It is
the conversion of leisure time into work time as our personal
experiences become products that have use-value (in that they refine
algorithms) and exchange-value (in that they can be sold directly or

indirectly to third parties). Listeners become estranged laborers as they
are separated from the products they create. Listening to music has
become synonymous with consumption largely because we have let our-
selves believe that music is a good produced by labor and has a value
associated with this labor. It becomes intrinsically connected to formats
that reinforce this quality of a private good. Much has been said about
how digital formats recast music as a public good by imbuing qualities
of non-excludability and non-rivalry. But to confuse music with its
medium of transmission (formats or services) is a fallacy of misplaced
concreteness and avoids critical humanistic issues. In the case of music
we have to resist treating listening as an exercise in material engage-
ment, embrace Smalls musicking, and appreciate that music is not a
thing, but a fundamental and critical human activity.
Notes
1. Significant work has been done in the last ten years to raise public awareness
about the implications of sharing information on social networks. In addi-
tion, there are frequent stories of people experiencing negative repercussions
(e.g. losing a job, being suspended from school) due to comments they have
posted online. This highlights an important aspect of prosumptive privacy,
which is that users can opt not to produce content they feel would put them
at risk.
2. There are other reasons as well, such as optimizing a service to enhance user
experience and satisfaction.
3. It is important to recognize that broadcast radio can stream their content
online. In my argument, I am making a clear distinction between any form
of media delivery that is essentially push versus those that are pull. Streaming
music services as I am discussing them are therefore defined by a users ability
to initiate content delivery.
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8
Digital Music and Public Goods
Graham Hubbs
Introduction
In the summer of 2000 which, for purposes of historical orientation,

predated the release of both iTunes and the iPod the file-sharing service
Napster found itself in Federal Court accused of contributing to copy-
right infringement. Lawyers representing the United States recording
industry asserted that Napster had deliberately buil[t] a business based
almost exclusively on piracy (Menn, 2003, p. 234). This characteriza-
tion of file-sharing as piracy implies that a person who downloaded a
digital music file from Napster had thereby committed an act of theft.
Napster in its original guise has long since passed, but the idea that
peer-to-peer file-sharing is theft lingers on. It can function as a back-
ground assumption in debates over the copying of music that is digitally
encoded in data files, to which I will refer hereafter simply as digital
music. Consider the following exchange in 2012 between Emily White
and David Lowery. White, who was born in 1991, asserts that she has
ripped thousands of songs from friends CDs and hard drives but that
she has not illegally downloaded any of this music. Although White is
concerned about musicians failing to be paid as a result of this sort of
music exchange, she seems to think that her file-ripping is not a sort of
theft (White, 2012). Lowery, who was playing guitar in the band Cracker
when White was born, disagrees. He argues that from the artists point
of view, it does not matter whether songs are copied from an online file-
sharing service or offline from a disk drive or CD; either way, the artist
fails to be fairly compensated, and the result is a form of theft (Lowery,
2012). Although White and Lowery disagree on the appropriateness of
sharing files with people one knows, both presume that obtaining files
via a peer-to-peer network from a stranger is tantamount to theft.
134
Digital Music and Public Goods 135
The view shared by White and Lowery here is primarily ethical, not
legal. Lowery (2012) is clear about this: he describes downloading deci-
sions as personal ethical issues, and he characterizes the sharing of
music files as a social injustice perpetuated against musicians. He
does not accuse White of deliberately committing this injustice; rather,
he characterizes her as a young person confused by two competing
worldviews. One, which he endorses, sees the unauthorized replication
of music files as infringing on the rights of musicians to reap the fruits
of their artistic labors. He calls the other the Free Culture movement,
a phrase he adopts from Lawrence Lessig without, somewhat ironically,
citation.1 According to Lowery, this worldview seeks to undo the princi-
ples that underlie the first view simply because it is technologically pos-
sible for corporations or individuals to exploit artists [sic] work without
their permission on a massive scale and globally (Lowery, 2012). Lowery
thinks that those who stand to benefit from the use of this technology
are advocating a shift in morals, one which, in his view, is wrong.
Lowery suggests that many are confused or even brainwashed by the
Free Culture mentality and therefore do not see the wrong in copy-
ing digital music. Describing the state of affairs back in the Napster and
immediate post-Napster era, Steve Jobs has a different explanation: We
believe that 80% of people stealing stuff dont want to be, theres just
no legal alternative (Issacson, 2011, p. 396, quoting Langer, 2003).
According to this diagnosis, those in the early 2000s who downloaded
music from peer-to-peer file-sharing services believed that what they
were doing was a form of theft, which they did not want to perform yet
were compelled to anyway. This characterizes the typical Napster user
as motivated by the following trio of desires: the desire for the track
she wants to download, the desire to pay either little or nothing for the
track, and the desire not to perform an act of theft. Although she believes
that downloading music from Napster is theft, her other two desires win
out, for there is no way to satisfy all three of her desires simultaneously.
One way to think of iTunes and Jobs appears to have thought of it this
way is as providing a means to satisfy all three desires at once.
These are not the only views one might hold regarding the motives
behind peer-to-peer file sharing, nor do they necessarily exclude one
another. White would appear to fit Jobss description quite well: she
wants a lot of music, she does not want to pay much or anything for it,
and she does not want to steal. She thinks that obtaining music from
peer-to-peer networks is stealing, so she does not acquire music this
way; she thinks copying files from friends is not stealing, so she goes
about doing so. This is all compatible with the Free Culture desire to
136 Graham Hubbs
get music without having to pay (much) for it. Perhaps it is necessary to
add Lowerys idea to Jobss to get a full explanation of Whites behavior;
perhaps Jobss account is sufficient on its own; perhaps some further
alternative does better. Whatever the case, Lowery, Jobs, and White her-
self all agree that had White assembled her music library via peer-to-peer
networks, her activity would have constituted a massive heist.
The goal of this essay is to critique this apparently shared assumption.
Before proceeding, however, it is worth noting that the very idea of
assembling a private music library can seem antiquated given the rise
of streaming music services such as Pandora, Spotify, and Apple Music.
White, Lowery, and Jobs all seem to think that for an individual to have
access to a vast musical library, she would need to possess a private,
potentially unnetworked device containing the music files. Streaming
music services make such a library available without having to own the
relevant files. One suspects that most of the music White spent hours
ripping is now available to her via these streaming services; it would
be unsurprising if someone five years younger than White found her
hours of ripping an old-fashioned waste of time. Mark Mulligan sees
the rise of streaming music services as the third phase of digital music,
the successor to the first phase of piracy networks such as Napster and
the subsequent phase of download stores such as Apples iTunes Store
(Mulligan, 2014).2 I will address this third phase at the end of this essay,
but my focus here will be on the inclination to characterize the networks
of the first phase, which have persisted through the other two phases
into the present day, by use of using the concept of piracy.3 I will argue
that the concept theft does not readily apply to the digital music that
can be obtained from a peer-to-peer network. Such music lacks the hall-
mark features of private property, so it lacks the features that one would
expect something stealable to have.
Instead, I will argue, digital music has the hallmark features of what
economists call a public good, for digital music in a peer-to-peer network
is neither a rivalrous nor an excludable good. It lacks these features
because it is, in a sense, spaceless. To be sure, digital music is embodied
in what a philosopher would describe as a medium-sized object, such as
a disk drive, which takes up space. This embodiment, however, does not
preclude a stranger from copying the drives music even as its possessor
listens to it, if the drives files are accessible via a peer-to-peer network.
The embodiment is thus practically immaterial. Put another way, digital
music in peer-to-peer networks occupies practically no objective space,
which I intend literally to mean the space inhabited by medium-sized
objects. Descriptions such as these carry an air of paradox, for they
suggest that such music is a spaceless object or exists in an objectless

space. What these descriptions are tracking, I hope to show, is the pos-
sibility of conceiving of this music as a public good. This in turn affects
the normative space in which digital music exists: because this music
lacks the hallmark features of private property, the norms that govern
the legitimate uses of bits of property do not straightforwardly apply to
it. To the extent that listeners find themselves operating with and in
these (non-)spaces, it affects their interactions with music.
A few framing remarks are in order before proceeding to the main
argument. In claiming that digitally networked music files are spaceless,
I do not mean to deny the obvious: to obtain these files in the normal
way, ones fingers must type on a keyboard so that two computers
interact with one another, which requires a variety of spatial altera-
tions. All manner of spatial changes can cause the download to fail:
either computer may be turned off, either may be destroyed, or the wires
involved in the process may be severed, etc. Practical spacelessness is thus
possible only if a number of medium-sized objects computers, wires,
etc. are functioning properly. This does not alter the fact that when
they are functioning properly, the music in them has the hallmark fea-
tures of a public good, features that distinguish such music from music
embodied spatial objects such as, for example, vinyl records or cassette
tapes. Jacques Attali discusses the latter sort of music as existing within
a network of repetition, which allows for the commodification of
music (Attali, 1985, esp. ch. 4); my argument is that this commodifica-
tion depends on a spatiality that, since the rise of Napster, is no longer
a necessary feature of recorded music. Put in Attalis idiom, my claim is
that Napster popularized a new form of repetition, spaceless repetition,
one of whose effects has been the partial decommodification of music.4
The point about space and spacelessness I have just made is rather
blunt, which suits the sort of charge it is intended to preclude. There
are, however, much more subtle complaints one might make against my
talk of spacelessness. Following the work of Jonathan Sterne, one might
argue that I am paying insufficient attention to the spatial constraints
that have caused the distinguishing characteristics of the predominant
music-file format, the MP3 (Sterne, 2012). Alternatively, one might
draw on Matthew Kirschenbaums work to argue that the spaceless-
ness I discuss is more superficial than practical and that my focus on
it obfuscates important technological details underpinning peer-to-
peer file sharing (Kirschenbaum, 2008). The only adequate response
to these and related complaints is the essays argument itself; I leave
it to the reader to decide its success. I should say up front, though,
138 Graham Hubbs
that my discussion is meant to capture the way listeners with rudimen-

tary technological skills and knowledge interact with digital music files.
The value of Sternes and Kirschenbaums work is, in no small part, to
reveal aspects of those interactions to which such listeners may be blind
or deaf; my topic pertains to those aspects that are transparent to these
listeners. It is my hope, then, that what I offer here will be compatible
with the different sort of project that Sterne, Kirschenbaum, and others
have pursued.
I should also say at the outset that in characterizing digital music as
a public good, I do not intend to advance a legal or ethical position
regarding digital file-sharing. I do not aim to exonerate, legally or ethi-
cally, those who have assembled digital music libraries via peer-to-peer
networks. I also am not giving a psychological account of the motives
that lead people to share or to copy digital music files. The point of my
analysis is simply to highlight those features of digital music relevant to
the application of concepts such as property and theft. I will argue, some-
what paradoxically, that the very fact that digital music in peer-to-peer
networks lacks the hallmark features of private property can explain the
attitude that obtaining such music is theft. Less paradoxically, it can
also explain why all digital songs, both networked and non-networked,
might come to seem like public goods. This last line of thought, I believe,
poses a serious challenge to coherently conceiving of digital music as a
private good. If we stop treating digital music as a private good, however,
we will need to revise the way we think about compensating musicians
for their work. If we want listening spaces to exist, then those who cre-
ate them should be able to make a living doing so. For musicians this
requires establishing institutions that allow them to live off their craft.5
If the central argument of this paper is correct, then in the post-Napster
age we should not be surprised if traditional institutions of private prop-
erty fail in this regard. I will conclude with some remarks on alternative
institutions that may preserve listening spaces.
Public Goods
The immediate forebears of public goods are the mid-20th century econo-
mists Paul Samuelson and Richard Musgrave. It is common to regard
Samuelsons work in the 1950s as the foundation of the modern theory
of public goods, but it is a paper by Musgrave that supplies what has
come to be the textbook definition of the concept.6 Musgrave defines
public goods in terms of the following two characteristics: [t]he first
is the characteristic of non-rivalness in consumption, i.e., the existence
of a beneficial consumption externality. The second is the characteristic

of non-excludability from consumption. The two are distinct features
and need not coincide. Each plays a different role (Musgrave, 1969,
p. 126).7 To say that a good is non-rivalrous is to say that one persons
use of that good at a time does not thereby preclude anothers use of
it at the same time. Rivalrous goods do not have this characteristic.
Shovels, for example, are rivalrous: if I am using a shovel, you can-
not, at that moment, use it as well. The music one hears at a concert,
by contrast, is non-rivalrous, for my listening to the music does not
thereby prevent you from listening to it at the same time. Although
the music at a concert is non-rivalrous, it may be excludable; that is, it
may be possible to require payment for someone to listen to the music. If
the concert is indoors, for example, it may be possible to require that
audience members pay an entrance fee, thereby excluding those who are
unable to do so. Goods such as these that are non-rivalrous yet excludable
are often called toll goods (Ostrom and Ostrom, 1977, p. 168). If a good
is both non-rivalrous and non-excludable, it is a public good. Abundant
natural resources, such as the oxygen in the air, are examples of such
goods. This oxygen at least, if we conceive of it as a mass and not as
a collection of individual molecules is not rivalrous: if we occupy a
common space, your breathing the oxygen in the air does not thereby
preclude me from also breathing it as well. Because it is impossible for
someone to control the oxygen in such a way that he could force us
to pay for its use, it is also non-excludable. Its possession of these two
features makes it a public good.
If one looks up public good in an introductory economics textbook,
one will find something along the lines of the characterization just pre-
sented.8 If instead one looks at the scholarly literature on public goods,
all that is to be found is chaos. Garrett Cullity shows that the only thing
definitions of public goods seem to have in common is their involv-
ing some subset of the seven features [that Cullity calls] Jointness in
Supply, Nonexcludability, Jointness in Consumption, Nonrivalness,
Compulsoriness, Equality, and Indivisibility (Cullity, 1995, p. 33).
This diversity of definitions is perhaps unsurprising given the variety
of concerns that arise over goods that readily fit under the head public
good. Compare, for example, depletable natural resources and national
security, both of which are common examples of public goods. A deplet-
able natural resource for example, the lumber of a forest may start off
non-rivalrous due to its initial abundance but may later be so depleted
that it becomes rivalrous (or, worse, non-existent). The worry here is
that the resource will suffer the fate of what Garrett Hardin famously
140 Graham Hubbs
describes as the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968). The worry

about public goods such as national security is not this; rather, it is the
problem of funding the good. If a nations armed services were funded
exclusively through voluntary contributions, a member of that nation
could enjoy the security brought by these forces without contribut-
ing to their maintenance. Because a person may enjoy a good such as
this without having to pay for a share of it, the good gives rise to, as
James Buchanan puts it, the spectre of the free rider (Buchanan, 1964,
p. 220).9 A standard solution to the tragedy of the commons is to insti-
tutionalize excludability, either through usage fees or quotas; a common
solution to the free-rider problem is the development and maintenance
of collective-funding institutions, such as a tax system. It should be obvi-
ous that concerns about free-riding are relevant to the present discussion
we will address these in Section 4 after we have carefully characterized
networked digital music. To develop that characterization with the
needed precision, we must first clarify how exactly we will understand
rivalry and excludability throughout this essay. I beg the readers pardon
if this clarificatory process seems tediously didactic.
First, for present purposes, to say that a good is rivalrous is not to
presuppose that it exists within a system of private property. Return to
the shovel: even in a system in which all goods are publicly held, only
one person can use a shovel at a time. The same is not obviously true
of excludability; if we define the concept in terms of payment for use, we
seem to presuppose that the goods in question are bits of private prop-
erty. For present purposes, let us explicitly reject this presupposition and
define excludability so that its application conditions need not include
the existence of private property. On this definition, a good is excludable
if a person can act on it in such a way that prevents others from easily
being able to use the good. This concept does not admit of rigid defini-
tion, for the notion easily being able to use is context-relative (as is, we
might note, the economists preferred notion of prohibitively costly). To
say that a shovel is excludable, then, is for present purposes to say that
it is the sort of thing that one person can act on for example, by put-
ting it under lock and key so as to prevent another from easily using it.
Saying just this makes no presuppositions about private property.
Unlike public good, the concept private good can only be properly
applied within a system of private property. Unlike public goods, private
goods can be bought and sold, and when one buys a private good, part of
what one buys is the right to exclude others from use of that good. Return
as ever to the shovel: suppose you buy it from me and take it home. Your
purchase does not alter its rivalrousness again, this is a non-economic
property of the shovel, and the shovel remains, as ever, only usable by
one person at a time. It likewise remains an excludable good, although
who can legitimately do the excluding has changed. Once I have sold
the shovel, I no longer can legitimately force someone to pay me should
she wish to use it; that is now your prerogative. When you hand me
money for the shovel, I give away something beyond the mere physical
object: I also give you the right to exclude others from its use.
In talking of legitimacy and rights, we move from considering the shovel
as a brute physical object to one that exists within a specific normative
space here, a space defined by the institution of private property. For sim-
ple tools, such as shovels, this move can be easily tracked by contrasting the
capacity to exclude from the right to exclude. Suppose I put a shovel that
I own under lock and key in an attempt to exclude you from it; suppose
that you beat me, take the key, and make off with the shovel. Should this
happen, it shows that I did not have the capacity to exclude you from the
shovel, but it does not follow that I lacked the right to exclude you. This
right to exclude, which can obtain even in the absence of the capacity to
exclude, is, arguably, the fundamental norm of private property.10
For a normative space that includes the institution of copyright, how-
ever, this simple distinction between capacity to exclude and right to
exclude will not suffice to demarcate legitimate from illegitimate uses of
property. If a bit of private property is copyrighted, then its owner has,
at best, a limited right to exclude others from its use. This limited right
is perhaps most clearly explicated by distinguishing a bit of copyrighted
material from its physical manifestation. Focus presently on books,
where the distinction is conspicuous. The copyrighted material is, to a
first approximation, the series and organization of letters, numbers, and
punctuation marks in the book. The pages and ink that are comprised
by the book are its physical manifestation. Should someone buy a copy-
righted book, type a copy of it mark for mark on her computer, print
what she has typed, and then sell the resulting printing, she would do
so without right and therefore violate the copyright. By contrast, she
may have the right to sell the physical book she has purchased; this is
commonly known as the right of first sale.11 If she has this, then she
has the right to exclude others from use of the physical object, but she
does not have the right to exclude others from the series and organiza-
tion of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks printed on the objects
pages. That right which, put positively, is the right to profit from the
organization of language belongs to the copyright holder.
Let us momentarily set any further thoughts about copyright to the
side: we will come back to the topic in due course.12 Instead, let us
142 Graham Hubbs
now return to rivalrousness and excludability. Note that library books,

though they may be legally borrowed for free, are nevertheless rivalrous
and excludable objects. That they are rivalrous should be obvious; if
I have checked out a book, you cannot read it (unless you read over
my shoulder). They are excludable for the same reason that shovels are
excludable either can be put under lock and key. Again, an object is
excludable if it is possible for someone to prevent another from easily
using it; clearly, books do not lose this property once they enter a
library. Although library books are available for the public to read freely,
they are not, in the sense that is presently operative, public goods.
With these remarks and distinctions in place, let us now turn to our
discussion of digital music.
Space and Old Musical Media
There is an active philosophical literature on the ontology of music

which attends to the differences between musical compositions, perfor-
mances of those compositions, experiences of those performances, and
related features of music.13 I shall have nothing to say here about which
of these is really music. For present purposes, we will define a given piece
of recorded music as a specific range of sounds produced by speakers, an
amplifier, and a frequency mixer all functioning normally. This defini-
tion is hedged by the terms range and normally to acknowledge that
a piece of music may be played louder or softer, with more or less bass or
treble, on better or worse speakers, and still be the same music, in virtue
of what is common between the diverse sounds produced. Conceived of
this way, music is essentially diachronic: it unfolds through time.
While music itself is essentially diachronic, it can be, literally, embod-
ied in a variety of static media. Vinyl records embody music in etch-
ings in the vinyl; cassette tapes embody music in arrangements of ferric
oxide; compact discs embody music in a series of polycarbonate bumps.
In each of these instances, there is a broader medium in which the
music is embodied: the whole vinyl record, the whole reel of cassette
tape, the whole compact disc. Each of these is a medium-sized physical
body, capable of being carried, thrown, hidden, etc. All of these objects
are, qua medium-sized physical bodies, rivalrous. For ease of presenta-
tion, focus just on vinyl records; also, let album designate a collection
of music embodied in any media, and let record designate vinyl discs.
A record is rivalrous for the same reason that any medium-sized physi-
cal body is rivalrous: if I have the record in my possession, you cannot
play it (or, for that matter, do anything else with it). Although this
musical embodiment qua object is rivalrous, its proper use that is, its
being played on a phonograph produces a good that, depending on
the circumstances, can be non-rivalrous. If the music is played through
headphones, then only the headphone-wearer can listen to it, so it is
rivalrous. If, alternatively, it is played through loudspeakers that sit near
a window that opens onto a public street, then it is non-rivalrous.
So far we have considered the record as an object, and we have con-
sidered the music it produces when it is played. Neither of these, how-
ever, is the most important way (at least in the context of the present
discussion) to conceive of a given musical record, or for that matter
any other physical manifestation of an album. Because the music is
embodied in an excludable and rivalrous object, the person who owns
the record may possess a capacity to listen to the music that others
lack. Consider a record I own that you do not. I can listen to its music
whenever I want, as long as I have ready access to a phonograph. You
cannot do the same unless you get the record. Should I sell my record,
I will thereby exchange the ability to listen to its songs whenever I want
for the money I receive. As goes the record, so goes this ability unless,
of course, I make a copy of the music on the record. With the advent of
domestic cassette recorders, it became possible to make a new embodi-
ment of a given bit of music and thereby keep the unlimited ability to
listen to it even after selling the original object of embodiment.14 With
cassettes, the copies tended to be subpar, but the advent of the domestic
compact disc writer allowed one to make copies that to the average
listener were acoustically indistinguishable from their source. These
copies were new musical embodiments, possessed of all the properties
described above: they were (qua objects) rivalrous and excludable, their
proper use produced goods that might be rivalrous and excludable (if
played on headphones) or not (if played in public on loudspeakers), and
in their non-use they contained the possibility of the music recorded on
them. The physical embodiment of the music in a medium-sized body
resulted in a replication of all of these features.
Consider these features now exclusively from the perspective of a per-
son who wants to own a given album she does not presently have. Let the
year be 1998. If she goes to a store to get the album, she will find herself
excluded; she will either need to pay for the album, or she will need to
steal it, in which case she risks getting caught for theft. She can avoid
both paying and being caught stealing if she either borrows and copies
a friends copy or arranges for the friend to make a copy. (To be sure,
this might violate copyright; again, we will come to this in due course.)
There are two things presently worth noting about copying the album.
144 Graham Hubbs
First, whether she or her friend makes the copy, the result will be a
medium-sized object containing the music and possessed of all the meta-
physical properties listed above. Second, whether she or her friend makes
the copy, while the copy is being made the friend must forfeit the rival-
rous good of being able to listen to the album whenever he wants. This is
clearest if the friend lends the album, but even if he makes the copy for
her, he cannot, while he is making the copy, use the album as he pleases.
Should he choose, for example, to listen to tracks in something other than
their original order, he will not be making a copy of the album. The album
cannot be copied without tacitly acknowledging its rivalrousness or its
excludability, so it has the necessary features of a bit of private property.
Spacelessness and Digital Music
None of this holds for digital music that is available in a peer-to-peer net-
work; such music is neither rivalrous nor excludable. Since the advent of
Napster, one need not acquire a medium-sized object in order to acquire
the ability to listen to a song or an album one does not have. Should one
acquire a bit of digital music from a peer-to-peer network, what one has
acquired is, as stated in this essays introduction, spaceless, a spaceless
copy of a spaceless original.15 The spacelessness of the original allows it
to be accessed without depriving its owner of the capacity to listen to it
while it is accessed. This spacelessness makes the object non-rivalrous.
It does not follow that the object is necessarily thereby non-excludable;
one can imagine any number of ways of devising network tollbooths
to require payment for access. Peer-to-peer sharing networks, however,
have no such tollbooths, so the files available in these networks are not
excludable. These files thus have the characteristic features of public
goods, not of private property, so any music encoded in them likewise
has the characteristic features of a public good.
With these points in mind, consider anew our character from the
previous section, now a decade on in a world with music files available
through peer-to-peer networks. She will be excluded from these files if
she lacks Internet access, but let us suppose this is not an issue. Suppose
that she joins a peer-to-peer file-sharing group online, searches for a
song she wants, and finds it. She encounters no rivalry if she seeks to
copy the file; indeed, it is possible that the person whose file she is copy-
ing is at that moment listening to the music encoded in it. She is not
excluded from the file; she can easily obtain it without payment. For
her, the file is like the oxygen in the air, a non-rivalrous, non-excludable
good. For her, it is a public good, not a bit of private property.
The very fact that digital music in peer-to-peer networks lacks the hall-
mark features of private property can, somewhat paradoxically, explain
the attitude shared by White, Lowery, and Jobs that obtaining such
music is theft. It obviously can explain the opposite idea, that obtain-
ing such music is not theft: if the music is not a private good, then it
cannot be stolen. The fact that it is neither rivalrous nor excludable,
however, is at confusing odds with the more familiar idea of recorded
music embodied in a medium-sized object. As noted above, to obtain
the listening potential of the music embodied in such an object, one
must negotiate its rivalrousness and excludability; within an economic
and legal system of private property, this thus requires interacting with
a bit of private property. To interact legitimately with a bit of private
property that one does not own, one must, with the owners permission,
temporarily deprive the owner of acting on his right to exclusion. When
a person downloads music from a peer-to-peer network, however, she
ignores any concerns of exclusion, for, again, music in a peer-to-peer
network is not excludable. When music is embodied, the only way to
ignore this right is to violate it, which can make any such ignoring seem
like a violation, that is, like theft. It is thus that the non-excludability
and non-rivalrousness of music in a peer-to-peer network can make it
seem like obtaining such music is theft.
It is perhaps more conceptually coherent, however, to run the inference
in the opposite direction. If a song is readily available in a peer-to-peer
network, then the potentiality of that song in any embodiment may be
considered a public good. To see why, it will help to mark a distinction
commonly drawn by analytic philosophers between type and token.
A type is an abstract object; a token is the physical manifestation of
some specific type. A recorded song, for example, is a type, and its tokens
are the musical events of it being played. Now rivalrous and excludable do
not apply to types per se; these concepts do not apply to abstract objects.
Nevertheless, we can use phrases such as rivalrous type and excludable
type to refer to types whose tokens are rivalrous and/or excludable.
Prior to the existence of digital music, the capacity to generate a song-
token of recorded music was necessarily embodied in a medium-sized
object, which, as we saw above, is necessarily rivalrous and exclud-
able. Song-types and album-types were thus necessarily rivalrous and
excludable. This is no longer true for song-types and album-types whose
token-potentials that is, whose digital files are available in peer-to-
peer networks. These song-types and album-types are not necessarily
rivalrous and excludable, because their tokens can be generated from
files that are, per the argument above, public goods. This by itself does
146 Graham Hubbs
not show that these types are public-good types; it only shows that
they are not necessarily private-good types. If, however, a given song-
token can be generated for free and without depriving anyone else
of being able, at that very moment, to generate the token, it would
seem accurate to conceive of the relevant type as a public-good type.
If this is correct, then it would be correspondingly accurate to consider
song-potentialities embodied in, for example, CDs as public goods. The
physical discs themselves may still be rivalrous and excludable, but the
potentialities they embody are not limited by this fact.
This shift in rivalrousness and excludability is, I think, a shift in kind,
not degree. If it is not already clear, it is the existence of digital music in
peer-to-peer networks, not merely the encoding of music in computer
files, that marks this change in kind. Were there no digital networks,
the encoding of music in computer files would not alter the rivalrousness
or excludability of music. The files would not be spaceless; accessing
them would require interacting with disk drives qua medium-sized,
and so rivalrous and excludable, objects. Once the files are available
in a network, however, their physical embodiment does not effectively
limit their accessibility. Copying the files does not require interacting
with their embodiments as medium-sized physical objects. To think
nevertheless of these files as rivalrous and excludable is either confused
or metaphorical: digital music just isnt made of the stuff of normal
private property.
Normative Consequences: Copyright and Compensation

after Property
This last fact has not, however, prevented digital music from being
legally classified as private property. In the United States, a digital music
file is subject to the same principles of copyright that govern the use
of records, cassettes, and CDs.16 Such a file is to be treated as exclud-
able, but not generally; it cannot be legitimately used as the basis of a
copy, so the file owner does not have the right to exclude others from
that is, to grant others access to copies made from it. In short, it is
to be treated as if it were music embodied in a medium-sized object,
subject to the familiar rules and restrictions that apply to such objects.
I will not argue that this is conceptually incoherent, although the label
copyright, understood literally in terms of its etymology, is not a per-
fect description of the relevant restriction as it applies to digital music.
Taken literally, copyright is the right to make copies; what is restricted
here, as noted above, is the right to grant access to the basis of a potential
copy. There should be no mystery why the literal notion of copyright
has been extended to cover this somewhat different case. The goal is to
prevent individuals from obtaining unrestricted access to a bit of musi-
cal potential that is, to a given song-type without compensating
those involved in the production and distribution of the music. One
might conceive of such compensation as a matter of social justice for
musicians, as Lowery does, but this is not necessary; a cynical record
label might want to enforce this extended notion of copyright simply in
an effort not to lose profits. Whatever the precise motive, the goal is to
prevent the public from having free and easy access to digital music.17
But if this access cannot, in fact, be effectively controlled via the exten-
sion of copyright law, and if we think artists should still be compensated
for making music, it may be best to stop thinking about music in terms
of private property altogether. As long as digital music is non-rivalrous
and non-excludable, we should not be surprised if it proves difficult
to fund through the private sale of individual albums and songs. Such
funding requires people to ignore how different digital music is from
medium-sized objects; indeed, it is remarkable how successful iTunes
was in the 21st centurys first decade at habituating people to treat non-
rivalrous, non-excludable goods as if they were rivalrous and excludable.
The power of Apple is mighty, and I have no basis for suggesting that
the model of the iTunes store which, to return to Mulligans multi-
phase schema, is the exemplar of the second phase of digital music
will run its course. If, however, a large enough segment of the population
comes to treat digital music as it is, non-rivalrous and non-excludable,
then means of funding that are sensitive to the public nature of the
good will need to be developed. It is of no use here to complain that
this depends too heavily on the charity of the listeners; it is just as
problematic to depend on listeners to buy something that they can
get for free. Apple has managed to get listeners to do this and thus has
delayed, perhaps indefinitely, the widespread acknowledgement of the
non-rivalrous, non-excludable character of digital music. But brute facts
have a way of being recalcitrant to false beliefs the Earth was spinning
around the sun for millennia before Copernicus took note.
If we stop pretending that the record is still the center of the musical
universe and understand digital music as a public good, we can frame
the funding challenge for music as a version of the free rider problem.
Consider the problem as a spectrum of possibilities. In the limiting
case, no one pays anything for recorded music, which, in turn, vastly
diminishes the quantity and quality of new music being produced. Let
the other end of the spectrum be what presently happens. Many musi-
cians are able to earn livings off of recorded music, but many more
would be able to if they received compensation for their music that is
148 Graham Hubbs
freely distributed in peer-to-peer networks. In the limiting case, univer-

sal free riding leads to the elimination of the public good of new digital
music; the result is parallel to the worst tragedy of the commons. As
we move away from the limit, the problem is, as Cullity puts it, one
of objectionable preferential treatment: [t]he benefits only exist
because others who seek them take it upon themselves to contribute
to their production: in taking them [the free-rider] arrogates to herself
a privilege the free enjoyment of benefits while depending on the
renunciation of that privilege by others (Cullity, 1995, pp. 223). One
possible solution to this problem, as noted earlier, is to establish and
to maintain a collective-funding institution, such as a tax system. The
case for a music-funding tax would be strong were music a universal and
compulsory good, as is national security. National security is universal
in that, if one member of a nation enjoys it, all others necessarily do as
well; to say it is compulsory is to say that it is impossible to opt out of
the good while still remaining within the relevant nation.18 Because peo-
ple can (and do) choose not to enjoy the good of digital music, coercive
taxation seems an inappropriate means for funding its production. The
challenge then is to find a way to institutionalize music funding that
moves beyond the model of the digital record store without coercing
the participation of those who do not enjoy the good.
One solution is a voluntary collective-funding scheme, in which
money is voluntarily pooled to produce a project without guarantee
of reciprocal benefit. There are already models for this, Kickstarter for
example. Frannie Kelley describes Kickstarter as providing a forum for
Internet-based crowd sourcing, which she characterizes as follows: [it]
works sort of like a bake sale. You pay a little bit more than that cupcakes
market value, and when your friends ask where you got it, you tell them
the gym needs a new roof and the 11th grade is raising money to fix it.
Album sales are less than half what they were 10 years ago. Your local
musician needs a new roof (Kelley, 2012). This analogy misses the mark,
but it does so in instructive ways. At a bake sale, a person gives money
albeit, more than the market would demand for an excludable, rival-
rous good, knowing that the profits will contribute to building what,
for the students when they are in the gym, is a non-excludable, non-
rivalrous good. A Kickstarter project need not and often does not involve
any initial exchange of private good for money; rather, each contributor
promises to pay her promised share if the total pledge goal is reached.
The initial economic exchange thus need not involve the donor receiv-
ing any private good in exchange for the donation. More importantly,
the analogy also fails to capture accurately the relation between the
donated monies and what they fund. It is correct in noting that, like the
monies raised from selling cupcakes, Kickstarter donations are contribu-
tions to a future public good. It is mistaken, however, in depicting the
roof as something that belongs to the artist; the roof is the music, and it
belongs, as do all other non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods, at once to
no one and to everyone. In spite of its confused analogy, Kelleys remarks
helpfully point out a natural solution to some of the problems created by
the non-rivalrousness and non-excludability of digital music. If we think
of digital music as a public good, then funding it through quasi-public
means such as Kickstarter is not only to be expected it is fitting. Some
sort of public model seems a natural solution to the problem, and so it
should not be surprising to see Kickstarter filling this void.
Another natural solution, at least for these early decades of the
Internet era, is to fund musicians through a hybrid advertising/subscrip-
tion service. This model fits well with third-phase digital music delivery
services, such as that offered by Spotify. Spotify subscribers can select
either a free account, in which case they are subjected to occasional
advertisements in their streams, or an advertisement-free account for
which they pay a monthly fee (Spotify AB, 2015). Listeners choose the
songs they listen to, and artists are compensated according to the
number of times their songs are played. This hybrid model generates
an excludable good that allows free riders to ride, though not for free
those who do not pay with money pay instead with the time that they
are subjected to the advertisements. The model has the potential to deal
effectively with free riders who, as it were, take their music ride on the
streaming service, but if the same ride can be taken freely somewhere
else, the problem of free riding persists. At present, the ride can be taken
somewhere else: first-phase delivery systems persist, and one may turn
to them instead of using a streaming service to obtain the music one
wants. As long as this is so, digital music will be a public good, poorly
suited to be governed by the institution of private property.
Notes
1. See Lessig (2004), which, appropriately, is available online for free. It should
be noted that both my use of free in the last sentence and Lowerys use
throughout his exchange with White is commercial: it denotes the freedom
one enjoys when one gets something without paying anything. This is not
the only use of free relevant to the present discussion, and it is not the
one that primarily concerns Lessig. Lessig is interested in freedom of activ-
ity, which need not be understood in commercial terms. Richard Stallman,
whose work on open-source software is an inspiration for Lessigs writing
150 Graham Hubbs
(Lessig 2004, p. xv), marks this distinction by contrasting the freedom of free
speech, which is not necessarily commercial, from that of free beer, which is
(Stallman, 2002, pp. 43, 59).
2. Mulligan wonders whether 2014 marks the transition to a fourth phase,
characterized by curated music services such as Beats Music. I set aside
discussion of this fourth phase, if indeed it be one.
3. I shall italicize terms to refer to concepts per se.
4. For a close historical study of the commodification of music in early
20th-century United States, see Suisman, 2009.
5. As with public good, I take the concept institution from economics. The slogan
typically attached to this concept is that institutions are the rules of the
game (see, e.g., North, 1990, p. 3, and Searle, 2005, pp. 910). The idea
is that institutions are constituted by norms that govern a given domain.
Institutions may be legal or illegal: for example, the institution of human
trafficking is the illegal application of the institution of private property to
the domain of persons. My claim here will be that the institution of private
property is not well suited to govern the domain of digital music. I discuss
institutions at greater length in Hubbs, 2014, pp. 6768.
6. For the claim that Samuelsons work is the foundation of the modern theory
of public goods, see Cullity (1995, p. 33), Musgrave (1983, p. 141), and
Pickhardt (2006, p. 439). For the argument that Musgrave is the source of
our contemporary definition, see Pickhardt (2006, pp. 4478).
7. Musgrave offers this as a definition of social goods, which replaces his ear-
lier talk of social wants (cf. Musgrave, 1959, p. 8). Public good becomes
the dominant term over the course of the 1970s.
8. Cf. Krugman and Wells (2012, ch. 17).
9. Buchanan appears to be one of the first to use the phrase free rider in print,
but the problem has long been a concern of those who write about public
goods. Consider, for example, the following passage from 1896 by Knut
Wicksell, whose work exerted a major influence on Musgrave: If the individ-
ual is to spend his money for private and public uses so that his satisfaction is
maximized, he will obviously pay nothing whatsoever for public purposes ...
Whether he pays much or little will affect the scope of public services so
slightly, that for all practical purposes he himself will not notice it at all
(Wicksell, 1958 [1896], p. 81).
10. See, for example, the central role that the related concept of just transfer plays
in Robert Nozicks Justice as Entitlement theory (Nozick, 1974, ch. 7.1).
11. In the United States, this right was established by Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus,
210 U.S. 339 (1908). The case there concerned whether Bobbs-Merrill, a pub-
lisher, could set the price that a merchant could sell its publications to the
public even after the merchant had purchased the publications. The Court
ruled that copyright protection does not extend to the resale of publications;
rather, it only pertains to the first sale.
12. Although we will return to the topic, nothing will be said here about the
justification of copyright law. For a recent review of some of the central
arguments on the matter, see Falgoust (2014).
13. See, for example, Bicknell (2009), Davies (1994), Dodd (2007), Gracyk and
Kania (2011), Hamilton (2007), Kivy (2002), Levinson (1997), Ridley (2004),
and Stock (2007).
14. For more on the disruptive effects of tape recorders, see Attali (1985, pp. 96 ff).
15. Perhaps more accurately, this practical spacelessness is a perceived space-
lessness. Again, I do not mean to deny that spatial considerations play an
important role in determining the size and quality of digital music files.
16. The precedent here is established in Mai Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc.,
991 F.2d 511 (9th Cir. 1993). On the relevance of this case to digital music,
see Fantaci (2002, pp. 6578).
17. For more on the application of copyright to digital music, see Vaidhyanathan
(2001, ch. 5).
18. The importance of these features to public goods and free riding are
discussed throughout Cullity (1995).
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free-culture.cc/freecontent/ (accessed 11 May 2015).
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Levinson, Jerrold. (1997) Music in the Moment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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of Public Finance. London: Macmillan.
9
The Preservation Paradox
Jonathan Sterne
The Preservation Paradox
Perhaps it is historians special way of shaking a fist at the image of their

own mortality, but every generation must lament that its artifacts, its
milieu, will largely be lost to history. One can find countless laments
in the early days of recording about what might have been had we just
been able to get Lincolns, or the speeches of some other great leader,
on a cylinder. But one can just as easily turn to ones own professional
journals, such as the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Here
is Phillip M. Taylor, a historian at Leeds, making the case for preserving
our contemporary communications heritage in 1995:
In 2095, when history students look back to our century as we now

look back to the nineteenth, they will read that the twentieth cen-
tury was indeed different from all that went before it by virtue of the
enormous explosion in media and communications technologies
But when they come to examine the primary sources for this period,
they will alas find only a ramshackle patchwork of surviving evidence
because we currently lack the foresight, let alone the imagination,
to preserve our contemporary media and communications heritage.
By not addressing the issue now, we are relegating our future history to
relative obscurity and our future historians to sampling and guesswork.
(Taylor, 1996, p. 420)
Later in the piece Taylor writes that even the [British] National Film and
Television Archive was only able to preserve just over 25 per cent of the
total broadcast output of ITV and Channel 4 in 199394. That means
75 per cent lost for posterity only a fragment of our contemporary
153
154 Jonathan Sterne
record (Taylor, 1996, p. 424). Taylors suppositions are relatively

straightforward. We live in a world saturated with media. In some cases,
they define contemporary experience. Yet if the goal of history is to
reconstruct the lost experience of the past, and if most of the past is
lost, there is no hope of recovering that lost experience. The logic seems
impeccable, so long as one believe that history is about reconstituting
lost experience in its fullness and that the route to this lofty goal is best
taken through an archive that approaches some ideal of completeness.
Our lives are awash in documents that will be rinsed away long before
the historians of 2095 come to examine them. I will disagree with Taylor
below, but let us hold on to his assumptions for a moment longer.
As it goes for media in general, so it goes for sound recordings, and
digital sound recordings in particular. Consider the following broad
categories of issues in the preservation of digital music documents
encountered by archivists: (Lee, 2000) digital music documents exist in
varying formats, which may correspond to scores, to audio recordings, or
control formats like MIDI or MAX/MSP algorithms that are essentially
performance instructions for computers. The storage media themselves
are unstable. Even if an old hard drive or disc were properly preserved, its
readability is an open question given the wide range of software and
operating systems in use at any given time. Even then, issues of intel-
ligibility arise: much of what makes digital audio work today relies upon
some kind of metadata, whether we are talking about the names of
songs and albums in CDDB, or the information on preferred tracks
and takes in a multitrack recording. As in the case of Van IJzendoorn,
the Dutch recording enthusiast who lost the notebook indicating place-
ment of songs on long reels of tape (see Bijsterveld and Jacobs, 2009),
the collection itself is, at best, laborious to use without a guide. Even that
analogy is inexact, since without metadata, digital files may simply be
unplayable, or even impossible to identify as sound files: it would be as
if Van IJzendoorn not only lost his notebook, but forgot what his audio
tapes actually were. Even if all of the technocultural considerations were
covered, the archivist would still be confronted with the usual set of
archival problems: is the document worth keeping; is it representative
or special in some way; and is it worth elevating as an exemplar of some
aspect of the past? For an obsessive collector or hobbyist this is perhaps
less of an issue than for an institution with limited space and budget and
the need for some kind of guiding collections policy.
One can only imagine the lamenting historians horror at this state of
affairs: the world is populated with an unprecedented number of record-
ings, yet they exist in countless different formats and with seemingly
The Preservation Paradox 155
endless preservation problems. Its cruel: we have made recordings more

portable and easier to store than ever before, but in so doing we have also
made them more ephemeral. Most of them will be lost to posterity, and
despite the efforts of archivists, there is really not much we can do about it.
But of course, there is more than one way to think about forgetting.
Here is Friedrich Nietzsche, who offers a very different perspective on
the matter from Taylors:
The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment,
forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing
on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or
fear, will never know what happiness is. A person who wanted
to feel utterly and only historically would be like someone who
was forced to abstain from sleep or like the beast that is to continue
its life only from rumination to constantly repeated rumination
(Nietzsche, 1957).
Nietzsche was writing against what he felt to be a paralyzing historicism

that dominated German scholarship in his lifetime. While he is prob-
ably not the first or best stop for political or aesthetic advice, Nietzsche
does offer a useful reminder that forgetting is also an important part of
living. It is perhaps too much to say that historians ought to be happy
about forgetting, but in order to do their work, in order for archives to
make sense, and in order for a document like a recording to have any
historical value, a great deal of forgetting must happen first.
Forgetting is both personal and collective. It is sometimes uncon-
scious and sometimes willful. Nietzsche ties it to life, Marc Aug (2004)
ties it to death and Paul Ricoeur (2004) ties it to forgiveness. The term
is broad and unwieldy, but for the purposes of this paper, we may think
of the collective forgetting that makes a given recording historical,
meaningful or valuable as that which subtends Taylors drive toward
the impossible task of preserving everything. From the point of view
inside archival institutions, selection and memory are willful acts that
define the nature and range of objects available in a given collection.
But outside the institution, the reality is considerably more messy. Lost
master tapes of famous recordings, stacks of unsold compact discs taken
to a landfill, or for that matter a poorly documented file on someones
hard drive are all small moments that may not in themselves constitute
a form of willful forgetting, but that certainly in the aggregate lead to
forgetting nonetheless. Why are some recordings available to us today
and others are not? The answer has much to do with will and selection
156 Jonathan Sterne
choice, but it also has much to do with broader cultural attitudes about
recordings and the sound they contain.
Countless writers have commented that recording in one way or
another destroyed sounds ephemeral qualities. Sound itself, they write,
was rendered durable and repeatable by Edison. Thanks to recording,
sound exists in the memories of machines and surfaces as well as the
memories of people. Certainly, this is one of the almost magical powers
of recording. As Bijsterveld and Jacobs (2009) remind us, it has been a
selling point for new recording technologies at different times. And cer-
tainly, the possibility of preservation opens up the fantasy of cheating
time and death through an unbroken chain of preservation. But the
fantasy that we can commune with the voices of the dead, that what is
recorded today will be preserved forever, is just that: a fantasy. Sound
recording marks an extension of ephemerality, not its undoing. The
same could be said of any form of recording, whether we are talking
about ancient tablets, dusty account files in a file cabinet, tape backups
of the universitys mainframe or the CD-R I burned yesterday. Most
records available today are simply waiting to become lost records.
More and more of my friends whether or not they are serious about
music are unloading their collections of CDs and LPs, preferring instead
to keep their collections readily available on hard drives. In making this
simple move, while retaining the music for themselves in the near term,
they make it much less likely that any part of their collections will out-
live them, given the short lifespan of hard drives. What will happen
when this comes to pass and their collections either fade away or disap-
pear rapidly? If it happens too soon, they will recognize their loss and
perhaps seek to replace the missing music. But the lack of durability also
means that their collections are less likely to outlive them, and therefore
will not recirculate through various kinds of used markets or through
others collections. In turn, they will never make it into archives. This
process is less a simple kind of forgetting, like forgetting where one
left ones car keys; it is more properly a forgetting of forgetting. Our
descendants wont even know what is missing.
In important ways, the forgetting of forgetting already structures
the history of recording. The preciousness that characterizes all record-
ing is perhaps most apparent in surviving early examples of phonog-
raphy. Originally used to describe early printed books, especially those
from before 1500, media archivists have expanded the term incunabu-
lum to include early examples of any recording medium. In the case
of sound recordings, an incunabulum is any recording from before 1900
(Smart, 1980, p. 424). Relatively few recordings from this period exist,
and those that do are treated like treasures by archivists. James R. Smart,
Library of Congress Archivist puts it thus in a 1980 article:
They are historic documents in sound which, more than any photo-
graph or paragraph, illustrate nineteenth-century performance styles
in music, in vaudeville routines, in dramatic readings. They teach us,
more than any book can, just what our ancestors enjoyed in popular
music, what appealed to their sense of the ridiculous or their sense
of the dramatic (Smart, 1980, p. 424).
Smarts point here is that old recordings, when they are preserved and
properly curated, become living documents of history in the present,
a point he makes even more emphatically elsewhere in his essay. Even
though no playable recordings exist from the first ten years of sound
recordings history, he writes:
we now have a large and priceless heritage of recordings reaching

back a full ninety years. When one considers that many early per-
formers were already fifty years old when they recorded, then it can
be realized that we have the means of studying the styles and tech-
niques taught as far back as the Civil War. Gladstone and Tennyson,
both contemporaries of Abraham Lincoln, are represented on now
nearly worn-out recordings, but Pope Leo XIII, born 169 years ago
[counting back from 1980], can be heard on two good recordings
(Smart, 1980, p. 422).
For Smart, the rarity of early recordings is paired with the rarity of
memory itself. He partakes of an ideology of transparency that has been
widely criticized by sound scholars, myself included, and yet it is unde-
niable that one of the reasons people find recordings precious is because
they offer some kind of access to lost or otherwise inaccessible moments
(Williams, 1980; Altman, 1992; Lastra, 2000; Auslander, 1999; Sterne,
2003). The curated recording is a hedge against mortality, the fragility
of memory, and the ever-receding substance of history. The interplay
between a bit of access and large sections of inaccessibility are precisely
what makes the past intriguing, mysterious, and potentially revelatory.
Thus, the idea that recordings can provide access to the past requires
two important prior conditions: (1) as Smart himself argues, it presup-
poses that certain recordings will be elevated to the status of official
historical documents and curated in an appropriate fashion; and (2)
in order for that process to occur, there must be an essential rarity of
158 Jonathan Sterne
recordings from the period. Most recordings must become lost record-
ings before any recordings can be elevated as historical documents.
Given the wide range of recordings made, the only way for a recording
to become rare is if most of the recordings like it are lost.
It may seem odd to think that most of the recordings ever made must
be lost before any of them can be found and made into historical docu-
ments. But in fact the vast majority of recordings in history are lost. For
all the grandiloquence about messages to future generations and hearing
the voices of the dead, most recordings have (and I would argue, are
still) treated by their makers, owners and users as ephemera, as items to
be used for a while and then to be disposed of. This has been a funda-
mental condition of recording throughout its history. As D.L. LeMahieu
wrote of the gramophone in Britain, popular records became almost as
transitory in the market-place as the ephemeral sounds which they pre-
served. Within a few generations, records produced by the thousands
and millions became rare items. Many were lost altogether (LeMahieu,
1988, p. 89).
Sound recording did as much to promote ephemerality as it did to
promote permanence in the auditory life of a culture. Inasmuch as we
can claim it promoted permanence, sound recording also helped to
accelerate the pace of fashion and turnover in popular music. Songs
which a few generations before might have remained popular for
decades now rose and fell within a year, or even months (LeMahieu,
1988, p. 89). The fundamental classification of recordings as ephemera
continues down to the present day, as record collections are routinely
mistreated, disposed of, and occasionally recirculated (Keil and Feld,
1996; Straw, 2000).
In this way, sound recordings became quite typical modern com-
modities, and the fluctuation of their commercial and historical value
depends on their mass disposal and disappearance. Michael Thompsons
very interesting book Rubbish Theory chronicles the life-cycles of similar
modern commodities. Thompson argues that mass-produced ephemera
begin their lives at a relatively stable level of economic value which
diminishes over time as they lose the luster of newness and become
increasingly common and available. This loss in value eventually results
in the object becoming worthless, at which point most of the objects in
question are thrown out. Once the object becomes relatively rare
through this process of devaluation and disposal it can again begin
to accrue value for collectors through its oddity or rarity. Thompson is
interested in old houses, Victorian keepsakes, consumer packaging, and
a whole range of odds and ends because of the relationship between
their symbolic and economic value (Thompson, 1979). His thesis

applies equally well to the ebb and flow of cultural value for sound
recordings, which were often treated poorly by their owners to begin
with. Even when cherished, analog recordings could be worn out and
destroyed simply through loving use. Either way, for all the talk of per-
manence, the careers of individual recordings followed the pattern of
ephemera for most of the technologys history.
Scarcity is a fundamental condition of possibility for historicity, but
that scarcity has to be created from a condition of abundance. When
history is not struggling with loss, it must struggle with plenitude. That
is to say, many recordings must be lost in order for a few recordings to
be found. And plenitude is on the minds of many archivists today
because on first blush, it would seem that we have denser saturation
than ever before in the history of sound recording. Over 40,000 albums
are released each year, worldwide, and in a given month over 1.5 billion
music files are exchanged on the Internet. With digital recording, one
would think that recording is more plentiful than ever, that in a certain
sense it is harder than ever to lose recordings. Instead, their ubiquity
became the main point of interest: as MP3s became popular in 1999
and 2000, writers began to put forward the idea of the Internet as a
celestial jukebox where every recording ever made would be available
to anyone, anytime and anywhere (see, e.g., Brown, 2000). While this
imaginary plenitude of recordings continues to be a selling point for
online MP3 services, it also raises new issues of selectivity and indexing.
After all, no single person can listen to even a meaningful fraction of
everything ever recorded.
Consider the case of an illegal recording genre like mashups.1 A mashup
is made by combining two or more recordings and beat-matching them
in such a way that they work together as a new kind of song. Strictly
speaking, mashups are illegal because they are made without any kind
of permission or sample clearance. Many of them are anonymous and
circulate through file sharing services that are themselves of controver-
sial legality in some countries. Although such recordings are available
in abundance and for free, I know of no legitimate archival institution
that has begun the process of collecting them despite the fact that many
music libraries and sound archives including national archives now
understand the importance of preserving popular music (a key basis for
the kinds of cultural memory explored by van Dijck, 2009).
In many cases, current selection and collection policies would actively
prevent archival institutions like the U.S. Library of Congress from col-
lecting and cataloging mashups. Thus, an important popular cultural
160 Jonathan Sterne
formation of the current decade will remain largely undocumented.

Eventually, many of the currently popular mashups will move out of
circulation and perhaps even disappear from most of their owners col-
lections if they are not cared for and backed up. A few dedicated collec-
tors will no doubt keep meticulously organized collections and perhaps,
a few decades hence, one such collection will find its way to a major
archival institution that exists in a world of more enlightened intel-
lectual property laws. This persons idiosyncratic collection will thus
become an important historical resource for anyone interested in what
mashups might tell them about the first decade of the 2000s. If this
story sounds strange or speculative, consider that the condescension
of legitimate archival institutions toward popular culture in the early
part of the 20th century meant that they collected nothing for decades.
Highly idiosyncratic collections, like the Warshaw Collection at the
Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington
D.C., have since come to play important roles in current historiography,
despite the fact that the collections themselves had no clear logic of
acquisition beyond the collectors idiosyncratic tastes.
Thus, in many ways, the reaction to digital sound recording is a
replay of attitudes that emerged a century ago, in the earliest ages of
recording. People hail the possibility for keeping, cataloguing and mak-
ing available all of the worlds music, all of the worlds recorded sound,
at the same time they lament the passing of time and the decline of
the available material into obscurity. These laments often go hand
in hand with practices that actually hasten the disappearance of the
music itself. In drawing parallels between the turn of the 20th century
and our own moment, in deliberately blurring the two periods, Mike
Featherstone (2000) writes of an expanding consumer culture and the
genesis of world cities that leads to the globalization of culture and
the increase in the volume of cultural production and reproduction
beyond our capacity to recover the various cultural objects, images
and fragments into a framework through which we can make sense of
it (p. 163). For Featherstone, the torrents of media ultimately point to
the failure of subjective culture to deal adequately with the problem
of selectivity... (p. 162). For, he writes, if everything can potentially
be of significance should not part of the archive fever be to record and
document everything, as it could one day be useful? The problem then
becomes, not what to put into the archive, but what one dare leave
out (p. 170).
Featherstone describes the crux of the problem for collector cultures:
theres too much to collect and not enough of a sense of, or agreement
about, what should be collected. Current criteria for archival selec-

tion are quite underdeveloped. For instance, the National Library of
Australias Guidelines for the Preservation of Digital Heritage are woe-
fully vague, suggesting simply that institutions should preserve mate-
rials based on the materials value in supporting the mission of the
organization taking preservation responsibility; that since future costs
of preservation are unpredictable, it would be irresponsible to refuse
materials that are difficult to preserve; and that some exemplary ephem-
era should be included with materials that have clear, obvious impor-
tance at the present moment (National Library of Australia, 2003). The
problem with this approach, as with all archival selection, is that it is
not future-proof in any meaningful way. The values that guide archival
collecting today may be irrelevant to future users of the same material
certainly this has been the case in the past. When you add the seem-
ingly endless permutations of recording formats, software updates
and reference quality standards, even the most basic decisions about
preservation become incredibly complex.
Perhaps by accident or at least by becoming less stable than their analog
predecessors digital recording formats are less aides-memoir than aides-
oubliez. They will help us forget. While such a proposition would horrify
Taylor, there are other ways to consider the proposition given that more
recordings now exist by far than at any other time in human history.
In his essay Forgetting is a Feature, Not a Bug, Liam Bannon argues that
with the massive proliferation of information occasioned by digital tech-
nologies, design must be oriented toward forgetting as well as remember-
ing (Bannon, 2006). Though his examples are banal the self-destructing
tape of spy movies, digital shelters that jam electronic signals and
sweeper technologies that would indicate whether a recording device is
present his larger point is that the overemphasis on memory is actually
debilitating. He is not alone. In 2005, the artist group monochrom held a
Magnetism Party to performatively delete data from hard drives, room
cards, audio and video cassettes, floppy discs, drivers licenses, etc. The per-
formance was a critique of information overload, but as Melanie Swalwell
points out, it was merely an extreme version of a more basic bureaucratic
imperative to delete. She gives the example in which she called the records
managers of a regional office of the New Zealand Customs Department in
search of a now-defunct system for importing drivers licenses (the system
was important for her research on the history of the game industry). The
managers responded, quite with some delight in their voices, that the sys-
tem was lost to history, because they dont have to keep anything longer
than seven years (Swalwell, 2007, p. 261).
162 Jonathan Sterne
Considering digital technologies primarily in terms of preservation

also often begs the question of what exactly is being preserved. Perhaps
alluding to personal photography and recordings, Bannon writes that
the issue of what is being preserved when we do make some form of
record of an event is also open to question, as usually it is the personal
experience of being there that is valued, not simply the visual or aural
signal captured by the machine (Bannon, 2006, p. 12). Certainly, a
good deal of audio recording (if not most) is now about the recording
itself and not preserving an external event, but this distinction fades a
bit as we telescope forward to the recordings life in an archive at some
future date. Materials in archives live on as evidence, meaning that for
historians they tend to point toward things outside themselves, and
thus even the totally self-contained recording that was never meant as
a representation of a live event (as much recorded music now is) comes
to represent some aspect of being there in the history. This is exactly
why Taylor is so worried about the loss of television broadcasts: without
the mediatic dimension of everyday life, without its flow, Taylor worries
that future historians will not be able to accurately capture the sense of
being here in the present.
We can already see this process at work in the preservation of early
digital games. Swalwell describes the problems facing the curation of
Malzek, a 1981 arcade game:
this game still cannot be played as it was intended: no one has seen it
working for 20 years, no one knows the correct colours, collisions are
not working, and there is no sound. Anyone can download a copy of
this (sort of) mass-produced digital work, but in this case redundancy
does not ensure the survival of the game. (Swalwell, 2007, p. 264)
The same conditions apply to digital audio. Not only will metadata be
lost, so too may be aspects of the files themselves. Archival specialists
also expect that preserving digital sound recordings will require more
in resources than preserving their analog counterparts. The added
expenses come not from storage itself (since digital storage continues to
become cheaper), but rather all the things that come with digital stor-
age: duplication and backup, the need to maintain proper equipment,
expertise for reading the digital files in whatever format they exist,
and all other aspects of infrastructure and maintenance (Russell, 1999).
Though there are really no data upon which we can rely with abso-
lute certainty, estimates for the durability of digital media are relatively
low. Unused hard drives fail within a few years and CD-R lifespan is the
subject of a broad international debate. Even optimistic industry esti-

mates for the lifespan of compact discs are relatively short by archival
standards. A public relations piece for Roxio (a company that makes
software for burning CDs and DVDs) estimates the lifespan of a compact
disc at 70 to 200 years (Starrett, 2000). A 1996 report by Yale preserva-
tion librarian Paul Conway (2005) argues that there is a general decline
in durability of recorded media over the history of recorded text.
Though he is primarily concerned with written documents, the same
reasoning applies to recording: a Berliner zinc or shellac disc will likely
be playable long after a compact disc.
Apart from the physical issues associated with decay of digital media,
there are a variety of other forces that work against any kind of preser-
vation. Foremost among these is Digital Rights Management (DRM), a
generic name for antipiracy algorithms built into digital files. DRM can
limit the number of copies that can be made of a file, or the range of
media on which a file can be played (for instance, some compact discs
are now released with DRM that will make them unplayable on comput-
ers). This is especially problematic for preservation because all archived
sound recordings are, sooner or later, reformatted because of the
speed with which recordings undergo physical decay (Brylawski, 2002).
DRM that prevents copying and transfer to new formats will effectively
render it impossible to recover or preserve digital files beyond the lifes-
pans of their original formats, and beyond the lifespans of the compa-
nies that control the DRM embedded in the recordings. The lifespan of
a recording with DRM is on the order of years, and perhaps decades, not
centuries (Gillespie, 2007).
Although digital technology allows for unprecedented ease in the
transfer and stockpiling of recordings, the current condition of pleni-
tude is something of an illusion. If early recordings were destined to
become lost recordings, digital recordings move in the same directions
but they do so more quickly and more fitfully. For while a damaged disc
or magnetic tape may yield a little information it may be possible to
hear an old recording through waves of hiss or crackles of a needle as
it passes through damaged grooves digital data have a more radical
threshold of intelligibility. One moment they are intelligible, but once
their decay becomes palpable, the file is rendered entirely unreadable.
In other words, digital files do not age with any grace. Where analog
recordings fade slowly into nothingness, digital recordings fall off a cliff
from presence into absence.
We can go a step further to argue that the very thing that makes
digital recordings so convivial, so portable and so easily stored is their
164 Jonathan Sterne
relative ephemerality. It would be wrong to compare digital media

with their analog counterparts to argue that digital dematerializes
recorded sound. On the contrary, the materiality of digital storage is
what makes it fragile and ephemeral. The fading ink on the CD-R, the
fading magnetic pattern on the surface of a hard drive, are banal chemi-
cal and physical processes and not at all related to the discontinuity
or disembodiment attributed to digital audio in other texts (Evans,
2005; Sterne, 2006).
So what should we make of a future where most digital recordings
will be lost, damaged, unplayable, or separated from their metadata,
hopelessly swimming in a potentially infinite universe of meaning? We
could follow Taylors lament and shed some tears for a future that will
never be able to reconstruct the fullness of the present we inhabit. But
how much history really does that? The conceit behind Taylors account
is that the historian is merely a poorer ethnographer, an ethnographer
whose subjects cannot talk back. But Taylor confuses a fantasy of his-
torical writing with its reality. History deals in fragments, with traces,
and whereas the fundamental condition for the ethnographer is some
kind of copresence, the fundamental condition for the historian is
absence. Most of human history is only available for present analysis
in extremely skewed and partial form. We make use of the traces left
behind, interpreting them, imposing our own frameworks and ques-
tions, and making them speak to our present. As with Bas Jansens
(2009) account of the mix tape, the referent of historical recordings are
not the actual selves behind them so much as what he calls the what-
it-was-like. Our fate will be no different for the future, and whatever
recordings do survive will be part of that history writing process. They
will be open to interpretation and subjected to questions and frame-
works we cannot imagine and of which we might not approve or
know to approve. But the future does not need our consent or approval.
This is not an abdication of the responsibility to preserve or to remem-
ber. It is only an acknowledgement that history, and indeed all forms of
memory, are first predicated on forgetting.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jeremy Morris for the title suggestion and important research
assistance, to the volume editors for their helpful suggestions, and
to Carrie Rentschler for a much-needed read. Additional thanks to
Matthew Noble-Olson for help with final edits.
Note
1. This discussion is based on a personal conversation with Samuel Brylawski,
former head of the Recorded Sound Division at the Library of Congress
and Mark Katz, The Second Digital Revolution in Music, Music Library
Association Meeting (Pittsburgh, 2007).
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10
Headphones are the New Walls:
Music in the Workplace in the
Digital Age
Kathy M. Newman
What kind of listening space is an office space? In Mike Judges cult clas-
sic, Ofce Space (1999), a lowly worker named Milton Waddam (Stephen
Root) is trying to listen to the radio in his shabby cubicle. The films
handsome anti-hero, Peter (Ron Livingston), is bothered by the sound.
Peter: Milton? Hi. Uh... Could you turn that down just a little bit?
Milton: But I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable
volume from 9:00 to 11:00.
Peter: Yeah. I know youre allowed to. I was just thinkin maybe like
a personal favor, you know.
Milton: Well, I-I-I told Bill if Sandras going to listen to her headphones
while shes filing, then I should be able to listen to the radio
while Im collating, so I dont see.ok.why I should have to
turn down the radio. Yeah. All right. Ok. I enjoy listening at a
reasonable volume... (Milton turns the radio down).
Peter: Thanks Milton.
Milton: from 9:00 to 11:00.
Ofce Space, one of the great satires of the modern day workplace, uses
humor to highlight the serious annoyances that most workers face every
day: egocentric bosses, meaningless memos, rude co-workers, equipment
that doesnt work, and slackers who get promoted. Not everyone goes
insane, but, in Ofce Space, Milton Waddam, with his thick, coke bottle
glasses and strange, monotone voice, is the ultimate wounded white-
collar worker. He has had his stapler confiscated, his desk moved and his
radio turned off so many times he is ready to set the company on fire.
But when it comes to being driven mad at the office, Miltons real
life counter parts might not be far behind. Modern-day office workers,
167
168 Kathy M. Newman
even well-paid managers, are chafing under the latest trends in office
management and design: the open plan office. Unexpectedly, one
way we can measure their suffering is by assessing the state of music
listening in the modern-day workplace. In the now dominant open
plan workplace, office workers listen to music via headphones, not just
because they want to, but because, in order to maintain their personal
space and their sanity, they have to. As one software engineer put it,
headphones are the new walls (Tierney, 2012).
In this chapter I look at the last decade of research on the effects of music
at work, as well as the ways in which human resource writers/bloggers
and mainstream journalists have used and reported on this research.
I argue that while much of the literature seems to be about music, as
well as what music-listening practices are best for employees, most of
the findings are more genuinely concerned with what is best for the
corporate bottom line. In other words, journalistic accounts of listening
to music at work are really about control, or lack thereof, on the part of
the modern-day office worker. Questions like, Is listening to music at
work good for workers, psychologically? And Is listening to music at
work good for workers in terms of increased or improved productivity?
are really questions about how much privacy, autonomy and control are
possessed by modern-day workersincluding relatively well paid and
elite workers on the cutting edge of a new economy.
Ultimately, these are questions about power, economy, and class
identity. As the economist Michael Zweig (2011) has argued, at least 62
percent of Americans can be considered working class on the basis that
they lack autonomy, power, and control in the workplace. As more and
more knowledge workers are moved to open plan workplaces, in which
even cubicles are dismantled in favor of an open arrangement of desks
and computers without walls or dividers, I am left wondering if now
even relatively well-paid professional/managerial workers are losing a
crucial share of workplace autonomy, and possibly even their class sta-
tus, in the digital age.
The History of Whistling While You Work
In the 1990s Marek Korczynski was a professor of sociology at the

University of Nottingham with an important book in the field called
Social Theory at Work. As a sociologist who was interested in both labor
and culture, Korczynski began to notice that very little popular music
had lyrics that talked about work even though most of us spend most
of our waking hours on the job. This curiosity spurred him on, and
Headphones are the New Walls: Music in the Workplace in the Digital Age 169
today Korczynski is both the founder of, as well as the most prolific
contributor to, a small but growing field of scholarship that looks at
how music and work intersect (Korczynski et al., 2006; Korczynski and
Pickering, 2013; Korczynski, 2014).
Korczynski and his colleagues argue that music and work have been
intertwined features of human experience for centuries. Korczynski shows
that in pre-industrial times work songs were closely associated with a
number of kinds of workers, from weavers to farmers, wagon drivers,
miners, sailors, peddlers, cobblers and tailors. Korczynski explains that
singing helped workers to keep time in the fields, but also at the loom,
and even on the bow of a ship. There were two kinds of sea shanties,
he explains, one suited for the hauling of ropes and setting of sails,
and one for working on the ships machinery. Each kind of sea shanty
had a different rhythm that was matched to a distinct kind of work.
Korczynski (2003, pp. 317, 318) argues that music and work formed a
dialectical bond of what he calls mutual constitution, with the rhythm
and pace of one informing the rhythm and pace of the other.
While Korczynski believes that work and music were dialectically
related, he leaves open the possibility that there was ambivalence in
the meanings made by these pre-industrial works songs. Were these
songs of consolation, or songs of recognition? Did they help to ease
the burden of work, or did they connect workers to a deeper conscious-
ness of their labor? Perhaps, Korczynski suggests, work songs blended
work and play in a way that did not treat them as binary opposites.
Perhaps these work songs helped those who sang them to create a map
of their world which allowed a melodious transport from the mate-
rial demands of labour while at the same time acknowledging these
demands. As Korczynski sees it, work and play were more integrated
during this time period, and there was pleasure within and through
hardship (Korczynski 2003, p. 320).
At the same time, this dialectal relationship between work and
play was relatively fleeting, because, as Korczynski argues, leisure and
work were forced to endure a big split under industrial capitalism,
for two reasons. The first was the urbanization and proletarianization
of previously rural workers, as the pace of labor was now more often
determined by machines and managers than the rhythm of a song.
Singing, whistling and talking soon became offenses punishable by
fines or worse. Under the dictates of the efficiency dogma that became
known as Taylorism, there was the increasing repression of sing-
ing, drinking or chatting on the job. The split between work and
play became part of the common sense of the era, as Teddy Roosevelt
170 Kathy M. Newman
opined, When you play, play hard. When you work, dont play at
all. But as the century progressed Marxist critics like Theodor Adorno
lambasted such ideas, arguing that, Work while you work, play while
you play this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline (Adorno,
2005, p. 84).
Korczynski argues that the second aspect of industrialization that
divided music from its connection to work was the commodification of
music. From the player piano, to sheet music for sale, to the gramo-
phone, and the radio, music increasingly became something workers
bought rather than something workers made for themselves. While
much research has been done in cultural studies and cultural history to
show that working-class cultural producers were integrated into the mar-
ket during this period as performers, songwriters, inventors and entre-
preneurs, it is certainly true that the commodification of music eroded,
if not eliminated, centuries of organically produced folk song traditions.
At the same time, there is much evidence to suggest that the
20th-century workplace was not entirely devoid of music. Granted it
was rarely music made by the workers themselves, but, increasingly
in both Britain and the US, factory managers piped in radio programs
designed specifically for the tastes of factory workers. In the US the infa-
mous company Muzak, which was established in 1934, began charging
companies for the right to pipe in Muzaks own special brand of easy
listening pop songs that were rearranged, without vocals and heavy
on the strings. Only sanitized instrumental arrangements were used,
because the absence of lyrics made the music less likely to intrude upon
conscious thought (Owen, 2006).
In England the BBC produced a radio show, Music While You Work,
which was broadcast three times a day and which featured light music,
dance music, etc. According to industrial research from the period, the
music was not supposed to provide workers with a rhythm by which
they could pace their work. Rather, the music was supposed to function
as a means of creating a spirit of cheerfulness and gaiety. Music While
You Work was supposed to relieve workers, especially women who were
entering into factory labor as never before, from the monotony and
boredom of the factorys repetitive tasks. But the workers were not
supposed to be too interested in the music that played while they work.
In 1942, the song Deep in the Heart of Texas was banned from the
program because it contained a participatory handclapping section that
tempted laborers to stop work and join in (Le Roux, 2005, p. 1108).
In the 1930s and 1940s there was also a rise in labor union cho-
ruses. Unions like the ILGWU used worker choruses for new member
recruitment, member entertainment, and member education. An hour-

long song cycle called My Name is Mary Brown, written in the late 1940s
by the Northeast choir directors of the ILGWU, was used to accompany
a slide show and later an animated short film. The song cycle retained a
radicalism we dont normally associate with the 1950s, including a song
called This is a Strike. Ironically, perhaps, the ILGWU chorus members
sang just about everywhere EXCEPT the factory floor. The Eastern PA
chorus performed all over the region, at ethnic and civic clubs, churches,
political events garment factory parties, hospitals, and community
agencies (Wolensky et al., 2002, p. 104).
In the first half of the twentieth century most of the management
literature about music in the workplace was focused on working-class
men and women workers who labored in fields and in factories.
A famous study carried out in 1972 found that upbeat, happy music
helped factory workers to work more efficiently by boosting their
overall mood. But gradually the question began to shift to white-collar
workplaces, as human resource managers wanted to know: is playing
background music good for office workers? (Fox and Embrey, 1972).
The Justin Bieber Effect
In the fall of 2014 a group of researchers in England conducted a study

that showed that pop music in general, and Justin Bieber in particular,
boosted work performance particularly processing speed for workers
performing a range of repetitive office tasks. Listening to Jessie J or
Justin Bieber could also improve your speed, with 58 percent of partici-
pants completing data entry tasks faster while listening to pop songs.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the study also found that dance music, such
as David Guetta, improved the workers proofreading/spell-checking
speed. Journalists of all stripes went nuts for this story, telling their read-
ers/viewers that if they listened to Justin Bieber they could improve
their careers, which is not exactly what the study promised. But the
study did show that office workers performed more quickly, and, even
more accurately, with Baby, Baby playing in the background. The
increase in levels of productivity when music is playing is striking,
said Paul Clements, Director of Public Performance Sales, PRS for Music
(Zolfagharifard, 2014).
Of course Public Performance Sales is the company that commissioned
the study and it is a company that sells background music services
to workplaces. But Mindlab International, which conducted the study,
stands by its research. The 21st century thus far has been a golden
172 Kathy M. Newman
age for effects of music research. Studies have shown that music can
improve cardiovascular functioning, help cancer patients to feel more
hopeful, bring about positive emotions, and even stimulate move-
ment in stroke patients. Music lessons for young people can improve
their verbal memory and improve their ability to process sound as they
age. In some cases even listening to particular composers, such as
Vivaldi, can make listeners more alert and improve their verbal fluency
(Morreale, 2013).
And, according to dozens of additional studies (and not just those
bankrolled by music companies), music is also good for us when we
work. Music, the studies show, makes us feel happier, and when we feel
happier we are more productive. Music can also calm us while we work,
or, more precisely, lower our perception of tension. Finally, music,
especially music we like, can increase our dopamine flow, which, accord-
ing to one researcher, improves our ability to focus (Lesiuk, 2005, p. 175).
Some of these studies claim that one kind of music in particular is
best for listening to while working. Classical music has been frequently
highlighted as a productivity booster. A famous study on Mozart and
task work, now called The Mozart Effect, found that children and the
elderly performed tasks better when they listened to Mozart, but the
studys findings have been difficult to duplicate. Another study found
that radiologists performed better and faster when Baroque music was
piped into their offices while on the job. Ironically, perhaps, this study
was motivated by an attempt to look at environmental factors that
could improve the work environment, given the increased workload of
todays radiologists. In other words, while hospitals could have chosen
to relieve the burden of overwork on their radiologists, Baroque music
was seen as a more cost effective solution to the problem (American
Roentgen Ray Society, 2009; Rauscher et al. 1993).1
In some cases the benefits of music are more subtle. One 1993 study
showed that workers listening to music in a major key reported higher
levels of satisfaction than workers listening to music in a minor key.
Other studies have shown that familiar music is the best music to stimu-
late a workers intense focus on the job, while, at the same time, other
studies show that music with lyrics can be distracting, especially when
it comes to retaining or learning new information (Blood and Ferris,
1993; Ciotti, 2014).
But for whom is music in the workplace most beneficial? Most
researchers argue that music in the workplace is a boon for work-
place efficiency, as opposed to (simply) a boon for the workers them-
selves. As Dr. David Lewis, chairman of Mindlab International, which
conducted the 2014 study, explained: Music is an incredibly power-

ful management tool in increasing the efficiency of a workforce.
It can exert a highly beneficial influence over employee morale and
motivation, helping enhance output and even boosting a companys
bottom line. So where does the benefit of music lie? Is music good for
boosting our mood? Or is it good for boosting the bosss bottom line?
(Flanagan, 2014).
There is some alternative research that suggests that listening to music
at work can be harmful to employee efficiency. Researchers in Cardiff,
England found that study participants who were asked to memorize
a list of letters of the alphabet in a particular order performed worse
at this task if they were listening to music. The authors of the study,
Perham and Vizard (2011), argued that the implications of the study
might be greatest for students, who are trying to learn steps in a math
problem or trying to memorize elements in the periodic table. Other
similar research shows that music at work can be more distracting for
introverts.
There is one kind of music in the workplace that everyone agrees is
terrible: co-workers singing out loud. Countless online forums, chat
rooms and discussion sites relay tales of co-workers who sing as well
as burp, fart, sigh, tap, sneeze and eat in a loud, annoying way. One
writer complained about a female co-worker who talked loudly on the
phone, and worse. If shes not on the phone, shes always talking
loudly with other coworkers. If she isnt playing with her coworkers, she
sings out loud by herself. She even dances from time to time. Another
writers co-worker actually whistles at work: [m]y co-worker is a great
whistler (cant take that away from him), but he must think its his job
to entertain the masses because his booming singing voice (vibrato
and all) and his loud whistling is a karaoke audiences dream and
co-workers nightmare (Yelp conversation 2015; Green, 2011).
In the end, most of the research on music in the workplace suggests
that when workers have the power to choose what they listen to they
are more satisfied, and, indeed, at times, more productive. Music that
workers do not choose for themselves, such as company provided
soundtracks, or the singing of annoying office mates, produce employee
dissatisfaction, and even rancor. One of the leading researchers on
music at work in the present day, Anneli Haake (2011), agrees with this
finding: The key is control When people choose to listen there can
be positive effects it can be relaxing and help manage other distrac-
tions such as noise. But when its imposed, they can find it annoying
and stressful, she says (Magazine Monitor, 2103).
174 Kathy M. Newman
iPod, Therefore I Am
Sound theorist and cultural studies scholar Michael Bull (2010) has
argued that the iPod, the most ubiquitous of the personal listening
devices (PLD), has given office workers greater control and autonomy
on the job. Using questionnaires returned to him from a variety of
newspapers, including The Guardian and The New York Times, Bull found
that iPods improved both the mood and productivity of their owners.
iPod owners wrote about how they used their iPods to keep distractions
to a minimum as their headphones became a kind of do not disturb
sign for busybody co-workers (Bull, 2010).
Bull (2010, p. 56) argues that while smart phones connect us to the
world, our iPods connect us to ourselves. As one iPod user in Bulls study
explained, I feel almost cut off from society if I dont have my mobile,
whereas I feel like Im cut off from a part of myself if I dont have my
iPod. Another user claimed to feel an unprecedented level of emotion
control while using the iPod. Another user went so far as to claim that
the iPod keeps me from feeling oppressed by being constantly sur-
rounded by other human beings. This is a pretty astonishing claim:
how many devices can claim to liberate us from oppression?
Ironically, perhaps, while many employers accept the idea that it is
good for their workers to listen to music of their own choosing, employers
do not like the iPod. The most commonly cited employer concern about
the iPod is safety. There are thousands of articles and reports, including
company policy statements and human resource newsletters, which raise
concerns about iPods and worker safety. One such article suggested that
listening to an iPod at 50 percent of its total volume is safe on the job.
However, if the work environment itself is noisy, exceeding 85 dB (equiva-
lent to the sound of city traffic from inside your car), then the worker
is required to protect their hearing, and theyd be causing hearing loss if
they substituted protection for another sound source (Main, 2011).
The second biggest employer issue when it comes to iPods concerns
how employees respond (or do not respond) to others when they are
wearing headphones. Employers frequently make complaints like this
one: I find it very frustrating when you approach an employees desk
and because they are listening to the iPod, they dont even know
that you are standing there. Other workers, even those in non-
supervisory roles, have also been known to express disdain for their
co-workers who use iPods. One office worker commented that every
worker should forego the iPod and do an honest day of work and
be proud of it. Another commented: If you are paying people to
work they should not use their iPod on work time. We work, then
play. This comment echoes Adornos idea on repressive self-discipline
cited earlier in this essay.
While employers often complain about PDLs and headphones, office
workers defend them vigorously, as one human resource consultant
found when he asked commenters to weigh in. The pro-iPod contingent
argued that such devices were crucial to their mental health. One office
worker suggested that if someone took his companys iPod privileges,
that someone [m]ay as well send the little men in white coats, because
I am off to the funny farm. Another worker claimed that, radio has
saved my sanity. Another worker claimed that the iPod was best for the
safety of her co-workers: If I were not able to listen to classical music at
work I would probably kill some of my co-workers. They are constantly
talking about their personal lives, which I am not interested in. I use the
iPod to block them out (Bruce, 2008).
Much of the writing on the pros and cons of iPods at work represents
the fight as a generational one. Digital natives, especially workers born
the decade before the new millennium, argued Pew Research Centers
Lee Rainey in 2006, have grown up with technology and not only want
to work with multiple inputs and stimuli including music they
expect to. Rainey gives the example of a father/son pair who symbolize
the difference between digital natives and old fogeys: David Cintz, 22,
who attended Cal State, and his father who worked for Hewlett Packard,
each has his own level of comfort with technology. The 22-year-old
explained the differences between himself and his dad: He can kick
my butt on programming, but Im the one who works all the time with
two monitors on, listening to an internet radio station, with multiple
IM screens on, or having online phone conversations simultaneously.
Notes the younger Cintz, Im the one living in the digital world,
plugged into more devices. For him, its work. For me, its lifestyle
(Rainey, 2006).
We Need More Walls, Not Fewer
Even some digital natives are chafing under the strain of the most
dominant office trend since the Great Recession of 2008: the open plan
office. This trend involves dismantling the much hated cubicle walls,
and replacing them with rows upon rows of open desks and monitors,
so that every workplace looks like a stock fund trading floor and
is about as loud, as well. While many human resource managers are
still skeptical about the iPod, over the last ten years, as the open plan
176 Kathy M. Newman
office has become both trendy and cost-effective, employers have been
increasingly permissive about headphones in the workplace. Indeed,
for many workers, headphones now constitute the only privacy they
have.
Take this widely publicized Washington Post article titled: Google Got
it Wrong: How the Open Office Is Destroying the Workplace. In this
piece Lindsey Kaufman, a senior ad writer who once had a private office,
writes how she felt downgraded and humiliated when her advertising
firm moved to an open plan office in Tribeca and she was forced to work
at a long desk surrounded by at least a dozen other people. After endur-
ing her first day of a co-worker she described as an air horn, as well
as the constant noise of background music, co-workers talking, laugh-
ing, and yelling, she barely made it until quitting time: At days end,
I bid adieu to the 12 pairs of eyes I felt judging my 5:04 p.m. departure
time. I beelined to the Beats store to purchase their best noise-cancelling
headphones in an unmistakably visible neon blue. She ended her
screed against the open office with a plea for more walls, not fewer
(Kaufman, 2014).
The open plan office is likely here to stay. As Kaufman points out,
a report by the International Facility Management Association found
that more than 70 percent of companies now use an open office layout
for their employees. Open plan offices have been implemented at tech
giants like Apple and Google, but even some hospitals and schools
are moving towards the redesign. Facebook recently bought a 56-acre
office park for $400 million, and has widely publicized the fact that
Frank Gehry has designed its new headquarters, which includes a single
room that is supposed to house 2,800 engineers, set to be finished in
2016, as well as a space for 2,000 Facebook employees in Seattle. And,
if open offices have allowed companies to shrink their square footage
overall, the open office trend has been a boon for office furniture and
design sales. A recent defender of the open office plan, Blake Zalcberg,
who wrote Its Time to Stop the War against the Open Office Plan
in The Hufngton Post, is the CEO of an office and school furniture
manufacturer (Bishop, 2015; Zalcberg, 2015).
As workplace historians have noted, the open office trend is an old
trend that has been made new. The white-collar offices of the early 20th
century were also made up of many individuals desks arranged in large,
open rooms. Most consider the first modern office space to be Frank
Lloyd Wrights Larkin Administration building for Larkin soap, which
was built in 1905 when Wright was only 35 years old. It included a large
atrium of open floor space with desks and people crammed together,
surrounded by six stories of inner walls and a skylight. Worker silence

was expected and aphorisms were carved into the walls such as, Honest
labor needs no master (BBC, 2013).
While Facebook is moving forward with its plans for the largest open
office in the world, for the last year most business journalists have
lambasted the open plan office as the enemy of worker morale and pro-
ductivity. Dozens of articles have been written attacking the open plan
office, with headlines like, Why the Open Office Plan Needs to Die
(Forbes), Open-Plan Offices Can Be Bad for your Health (The Guardian),
and The Open Office Trap (The New Yorker). Why are open offices
under attack? As white-collar workers have moved from individual
offices, to cubicles, to the open office, they have lost hundreds of square
feet of personal space. One expert claims that in the 1970s employers
budgeted 500700 square feet per employee, usually in the form of an
individual office. The decline since the 1970s has been precipitous;
according to Corenet Global, in 2010 the typical employee had 225
square feet of personal space, while in 2013 it was estimated to have
shrunk to 150 square feet (Vincent, 2010).
Open offices are supposed to increase communication between
employees and make collaboration more effortless. Ironically, however,
as employees have been turning to iPods and headphones as a way of
coping with their loss of personal space, the communication flow in
the open office is even worse than communication during the cubicle
era. One worker explains that, as a creative person I love to collabo-
rate but I love solitude equally as much because distractions for me are
very counter productive. Another worker complains about the curse
of the headphones: Because everyone is trying to focus and crank
out their work in peace, we have become long rows of people wearing
headphones all day the exact opposite of the vibrant, collaborative
space the open-office layout was meant to promote (Fast Company
Staff, 2013).
When I surveyed what human resource managers thought about head-
phones and iPods, it looked on the surface like a fight between employ-
ers, who wanted to ban iPods, and employees, who begged for them.
But the open plan office has shifted the terrain of struggle. As Lindsay
Kaufmans story suggests, most employers would be happy to let their
workers spend $169.99 on a pair of Beats headphones rather than invest
in cubicle walls, or, even more costly, walls made of wood and plaster.
There are some companies that have nearly abandoned the office
concept all together. How many workers are expected to set up shop
in Starbucks, or in their own homes, and at what cost? What are
178 Kathy M. Newman
companies saving as they no longer have to install landlines, telephone

systems, and receptionists? What costs are workers picking up in the
new economy? And, most importantly, how much control have white-
collar workers ceded in the process?
The End of the Professional Managerial Class?
When I started this project I thought I was merely investigating the

latest research about the benefits of music in the workplace. I thought
of myself as trying to extend the wonderful work of Marek Korczynski
and his colleagues, to show how music and work were intertwined in
the white-collar office of the present day. But I quickly discovered that
the subject of music and work led me to something else: the subjects
of power and class. As one modern-day worker complained to the Fast
Company staff: [The open office] was designed by psychopathic sadistic
elitists that have their own office (Fast Company Staff, 2013).
Psychotic, sadistic elitists. Thats certainly one way to define the capital-
ist class. How do we define other class groupings in the United States? If
we ask economist Michael Zweig, he will tell us that the working class
is defined by its lack of autonomy and power. In his book The Working
Class Majority (2000), Zweig argues that when we use the variables of
power and autonomy, as opposed to salary or lifestyle, we will see that
the majority of Americans those who work as white-collar bank tellers,
call-center workers, and cashiers; blue-collar machinists, construction
workers, and assembly-line workers; pink-collar secretaries, nurses, and
home-health-care workers skilled and unskilled are working class.
Zweig argues that increasingly we should add university adjuncts, low-
paid public defenders, teachers who are forced to use scripted curricula,
and even doctors who serve low-income communities to the ranks of
the working class (Barron, 2015).
If we use the variables of power and autonomy, where do white-collar
workers who have been forced to work in open plan offices fit into our
class categories? Surely Lisa Kaufman, the senior copywriter who wrote
about her open plan office, is not working class? And what about Dafna
Sarnoff, an American Express VP who recently went to work at a smaller
tech and marketing company called Yodle? After years with nice perks
and even nicer offices, she wondered if she would be given an office
when she got to Yodle, and, indeed, she was not. Is it fair to ask: has
Dafna Sarnoff experienced downward mobility? (Barron, 2015).
While it might be too extreme to argue that white-collar workers in
an open plan office are working class, it is crucial that we look at what
kinds of power and autonomy workers have forfeited since the 2008
recession. Ironically, perhaps, it is the workers who are most central to
the new economy technology and information workers who are most
likely to be working under the panoptic glare of the open plan office.
Though these workers were once safe inside their own offices with walls
and doors, or, for a time, out of view behind a cubicle, today the typi-
cal white-collar worker, even those who make six figures, are forced to
create more metaphorical space between themselves and their nattering,
farting, burping, yelling coughing, sneezing, eating, slurping co-workers.
To create this virtual space they need high-end noise-cancelling head-
phones which they have to buy for themselves. What workers are lis-
tening to on those headphones suddenly seems far less important than
the fact that those headphones have become their only shield their
only source of privacy in a corporate culture gone nearly mad.
Note
1. The Mozart effect, a term coined by French researcher Alfred Tomatis in his
1991 book Pourquoi Mozart? was popularized further by a study published in
Nature in 1993.
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11
Researching the Mobile Phone
Ringtone: Towards and Beyond
The Ringtone Dialectic
Sumanth Gopinath
It is a somewhat perverse exercise to write a large book about a very

small thing. In The Ringtone Dialectic, I did just that: I investigated the
cellphone ringtone, the 30-second or shorter sound (typically, a musical
one) that alerts you to an incoming call on your phone (Gopinath, 2013,
hereafter RD). The ringtone, however, not only acts as a functional sig-
nal but also allows you to customize that signal, permitting you to dis-
play your musical taste (or clever irony) to passers-by, to provide a little
musical or sonic treat to yourself to compensate for the fact that youre
perpetually available to your social and employment network (Licoppe,
2008), or to simply differentiate your cellphone from other cellphones
crowding the soundscape that you inhabit. As a popular commodity,
however, the ringtone collectively became something much bigger than
its miniscule constituent components. Common on mobile phones start-
ing in the late 1990s, the customization of ringtones became a novelty
fad popular among children and teenagers (among others), and once
firms got into the business of selling versions of popular songs the
ringtone ballooned into a multibillion dollar industry at one point
allegedly providing as much as 10 percent of total global music industry
revenue (roughly $3 billion out of $32 billion in 2003). The ringtone
is, of course, yesterdays news: it began attracting significant attention
in Europe and East Asia in the late 1990s and in the US by the early
2000s, and by the second decade of the new millennium it was said to
be dead (Anonymous, 2010; RD, pp. xiiixiv, 3). Today, ringtones pro-
vide relatively little income to firms still trying to sell them: by the end
of 2012, all ringtones, ringback tones, and other mobile music products
(including music videos, full-length digital audio downloads, and other
music products purchased through phone-specific portals) amounted
to $166.9 million, down more than 80 percent from its peak of nearly
182
Researching the Mobile Phone Ringtone 183
$1 billion in 2008 in the US, and the decline appears to be continuing

apace (Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 2013).1 When
I began studying the ringtone in 2004 it had yet to peak as an economic
and cultural phenomenon; by the time the book was published in the
fall of 2013, the ringtone was a residual phenomenon, long replaced by
the app economy that is now inextricable from everyday smartphone
and tablet computer use worldwide2.
The task of scholarship, however, should not necessarily be to follow
and dissect popular trends certainly not exclusively, at any rate. Rather,
it should illuminate both the unfamiliar and the exceedingly familiar; it
should aim to explain history not only as it actually was (wie es eigentlich
gewesen in the 19th-century German historian Leopold Rankes famous
and problematic dictum3) and attempt to bring it to life (to make the
stone stony, in Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovskys words4); it
should also recognize that facts are never mere facts, but always exist
within a conceptual framework, whether explicitly articulated or implic-
itly present5. As a now-outdated fad, the ringtone is, like all recently
outmoded fashion items, the most radical anti-aphrodisiac imaginable,
in the words of the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin (1999, p. 64; RD, p.
49). The ringtones very condition is one of uncool or, better, of forget-
table unimportance and this allows us, I think, a certain distance from
which we might attempt to understand what it actually was and how we
might conceptualize it. Now unviable as an economic entity, the ringtone
arguably becomes far more viable as an object of historical and cultural
inquiry.6 In what follows, Ill provide a brief description of how I came to
research the ringtone and ringtone industry, of the facts that characterize
the ringtone and its industry, of my conceptual framework for interpret-
ing those facts (which involves a blend of different forms of Marxist cul-
tural, economic, and political theory), and of some of the more surprising
findings that resulted from the course of my study.
While in graduate school in music theory at Yale University, I partici-
pated in a research group led by the Marxist cultural studies scholar
Michael Denning; the group, called The Working Group on Culture
and Globalization, chose its research projects collaboratively from year
to year, and for its first year (fall 2003spring 2004) we decided that
we should undertake a collective project on the cultural dimensions of
the commodity chain of a single commodity in other words, look-
ing at the commodity in terms of its entire lifespan, from resource
extraction to various stages of production to distribution (transport and
warehousing) to marketing and sales and finally disposal (Hopkins and
Wallerstein, 1977; Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, 1994; Bair, 2009). We had
184 Sumanth Gopinath
not decided upon the commodity to investigate, however, and sometime

in the spring of 2004 I found myself sitting alone in a computer lab try-
ing to think of a commodity particularly worthy of examination, when
two undergraduate students walked in, a young woman and a young
man. The womans cellphone rang with a familiar tune that I couldnt
place and that sounded like the following example.7 (See Figure 11.1.)
The man said, Nice ringtone. She replied, Do you know what it is?
He answered, Yeah, its the Cantina Band from Star Wars. I saw that
they were flirting over her cellphones ringtone a word I hadnt even
heard before and I realized that this was a significant social phenom-
enon, that the cellphone could be our groups commodity, and that for
my contribution I would study the ringtone. We ended up giving a group
panel presentation of several short, 10-minute papers, which we pre-
sented at the Cultural Studies Association conference in Boston in early
May of that year. The panel was very well received, and later that summer
I wrote a long essay on ringtones that I published in First Monday in
2005 and that became the basis of my book (Gopinath, 2005).
The primary argument of that essay and the book focuses on a simple
factual transformation in the ringtones very structure. All ringtones
are digital files of some kind, but the content of those files has varied
quite drastically since the inauguration of the customizable ringtone
in the late 1990s. Early ringtones were simple: they typically played a
single melodic line, performed by a rather primitive synthesizer. This
type of ringtone is called a monophonic ringtone and monophonic
here is much more literal than in its music-theoretical sense, in that
it means that only a single sound (rather than a single line or melody)
may be produced at any one time8. Within a few years, phones began
to play more complex synthesizer files, in which more than one sound
could be produced at the same time; instead of a single beeping melody
or sound effect, phones could present synthesized arrangements of
whole bands or other musical ensembles, much in the way that many
digital keyboard synthesizers or software programs can do. This type
of ringtone is called a polyphonic ringtone. By the early to mid-2000s,
higher-end phones were using digital sound files. Initially these were
very low-grade files, but in their structure they were effectively the same
Figure 11.1 Mystery ringtone, spring 2004, Yale University

as the widely available MP3 files that are currently the most common
media format for listening to recorded music. Today, the only thing that
distinguishes any MP3 (or comparable file) from a ringtone is where
it is located within a mobile phones file directory and the fact that
many phones/carriers still do not allow ringtones to be longer than 30
seconds9. (Some phones require that ringtones receive a separate file for-
mat extension such as .m4r on the iPhone, a renaming of the standard
.m4a for AAC digital files.)
This simple series of changes had enormous consequences for the
ringtone industrys development. Chief among these were economic.
When the ringtone was a monophonic or polyphonic synthesizer-file
adaptation of a pre-existing musical selection, which was by far the
most common type of ringtone (as opposed to originally composed
ringtones), copyright law understood them to be arrangements of those
songs, and hence they were treated like cover songs. This meant that the
selections or songs composer (and the company publishing it) received a
certain, relatively nominal, fee from the companies selling the ringtones
(between 8.5 and 10 cents per ringtone sold). In contrast, a ringtone
made of a digital sound file not only used a pre-owned song or composi-
tion, but also had to license the master recording of that song or compo-
sition, and hence had to obtain and pay for that recording from a record
label. The heyday of monophonic and polyphonic ringtones typically
involved smaller companies that jumped into the nascent ringtones
market before larger music-business firms thought to do so, and these
firms helped to make up the emergent mobile entertainment industry
with such companies also selling other digital products for phones, like
phone wallpaper (which could customize the display screen of ones
cellphone). The major recording industry labels like BMG, Universal,
Sony/Columbia, Warner, EMI, etc. were not pleased with this state of
affairs as they were cut out of the lions share of profits (which instead
went to mobile entertainment firms), but they knew that if ringtones
became sound files, the legal situation would favor them much more
and allow them to squeeze out smaller companies or competitor firms of
a much larger size. (In an example of the latter, the Japanese instrument
company Yamaha was involved in selling high-quality polyphonic ring-
tones and became one of the largest ringtone sales firms in the world
in the early to mid-2000s.) Phone manufacturers sought to improve the
quality of their ringtones and thus a process of technological conver-
gence took place, in which the upgrading of phones ringtone formats
was motivated by phone handset design engineers desires to improve
phone performance and by pressure from the recording industry. By the
mid- to late 2000s, firms partnering with or owned by the major record
labels were the dominant players in the mobile entertainment industry.
Thanks in part to the major labels oligopoly control of the sound-file
ringtone market, this involved a major hike in the price of ringtones:
whereas polyphonic ringtones might cost $.99 or $1.99, sound file
ringtones were upwards of $2.99 far more than the full-length digital
sound files (the same product!) that were locked into a price point of
$0.99 by sales portals like the iTunes store (RD, pp. 1926).
Small wonder, then, that recording industry spokespersons began to
announce that ringtones might actually reverse their industrys declining
fortunes, which had allegedly suffered on account of unauthorized file-
sharing. (Others argued that the industry was bloated and flooding the
market with substandard products, and that filesharing was a necessary
corrective to this situation.) But as overpriced products, sales of sound
file ringtones were essentially the result of what technology journalists
called a walled garden: a mobile phone operating system and file
directory that were extremely difficult to access by ordinary consumers,
hence making it nearly impossible for them to upload their own digital
sound files onto their phones and bypass the entire ringtone industry
altogether. Companies like Xingtone developed inexpensive software
packages that allowed phone users to upload music from compact discs
and digital sound files on their computers without having to pay extra
for each individual ringtone. Moreover, starting in 2007 with the advent
of Apples iPhone and other smartphones, which spurred the ongoing
convergence between the telephone and Internet networks, it became
easier to exchange and access files on cellphones, and online blogs and
reporters conspired to teach consumers how to avoid paying for ring-
tones. It wasnt long before ringtone industry profits began to dwindle,
and after receiving additional setbacks on account of the recession of
20082009, they would simply never recover (RD, pp. 3952).10
Economic shifts, however, were not the only noteworthy effects of
the ringtones technical transformations if they can even be called
effects at all, since the technical shifts themselves were ultimately
inseparable from the economic motivations that lay behind them. For
example, one of the studies I undertook in the book involved examin-
ing how ringtones were made, and I discovered that, like all products,
ringtones required a labor force to produce. It turns out that the labor of
making ringtones changed quite drastically as the file formats changed:
the skill requirements and labor time involved in making a ringtone
became much greater once the ringtone transformed from a single,
simple beeping melody into a full-blown imitation of a particular
musical recordings entire instrumental arrangement, as this required a

very skilled musician to undertake a fairly extensive exercise in musical
transcription. In contrast, once the ringtone became an audio file, all that
was required was for someone to excerpt a 30-second audio clip from
the original file. Unsurprisingly, the payment that workers received per
ringtone decreased drastically and fewer workers were needed to maintain
comparable volumes of output; indeed, perhaps the ease of producing ring-
tones helped to spur supply firms to develop massive catalogs of sound-
file ringtones and thus profoundly increase output volume. In addition to
the decreasing wages and employment opportunities that resulted from
the sound-file ringtones emergence, the character of the work changed,
becoming simpler, more rote, less satisfying, and thus deskilled, to invoke
Marxist writer Harry Bravermans charged but vitally important term to
describe a general tendency in industrial manufacturing (RD, pp. 5779).
The disappearance of an entire industry had consequences in the lives of
the musicians who worked within it. One of my interviewees, Billy Dixon,
was a young hip-hop producer who worked for the hip-hop magazine and
brand The Source. In the mid-2000s, The Source owned and administered a
polyphonic ringtone channel, which was a kind of subscription service
that one could purchase via ones cellphone service plan. In summing up
his experiences working in the industry, Dixon noted:
It affected me heavily actually, during polyphonics, I made nearly

zero music of my own. After, for a good while, I did audio tones, and
during that phase, only really got into my own music again because
I pushed myself. It was hard, taking what I do to create and express,
and then doing the same thing without any creativity of my own to
make money, for a job. It was confusing, for me anyway. Ive only just
in the last year made a little bit of my own music, so yeah, definitely
a large dynamic phased itself through my experience (RD, p. 74).
The technical-economic changes in the ringtone industry did not only

affect its labor practices, however; they were also registered in various
aspects of cultural production: popular and classical music, film and tele-
vision, and art installations and performances.11 To take one example, I
found that an entire subgenre of contemporary classical compositions
from the early to mid-2000s invoked the Nokia Tune a melody that was
once the most popular ringtone in the world, heard an estimated 1.8 bil-
lion times per day. Compositions ranged from the rather modest, such as
virtuoso pianist Marc-Andr Hamelins The Ringtone Waltz (2006, possibly
earlier), which he would play whenever an audience members ringtone
interrupted his performance, to the more ambitious, such as Italian

avant-gardist composer Salvatore Sciarrinos remarkable Archeologia del
telefono (Archeology of the Telephone) from 2005, in which the composer
uses traditional acoustic instruments to imitate the sounds of phone
signals in order to critique the ways in which they have overtaken our
auditory experiences and everyday lives (RD, pp. 10314). The number of
new Nokia Tune compositions peaked just as the monophonic and poly-
phonic ringtone were giving way to the sound file, and they declined pre-
cipitously in the second half of the new millenniums first decade. One
might argue the Nokia Tune became less interesting as a sonic phenom-
enon to composers once it stopped appearing in its most abrasive and
distinctive monophonic guise. Moreover, due to the increased opportuni-
ties for phone customization offered by the sound file ringtone, as well
as the decline in popularity of Nokia phones themselves (especially once
the smartphone became common), the Nokia Tune likely became less
important as a sonic reference point particularly as it came to be largely
replaced by other default ringtones, such as the iPhones Marimba (RD,
pp. 22126). Finally, one should not overestimate the way in which the
quotation of the Nokia Tune wore itself out as a kind of compositional
gimmick, the belated use of which would indicate a composers being
out-of-touch from, rather than aware of, contemporary social realities.
In contrast, a more obvious change resulting from the file-format shifts
in the ringtone industry can be found in the use of political ringtones.
Before the presence of the sound file ringtone, ringtones used by phone
owners to signify political allegiances were limited by the inability of
a monophonic or polyphonic ringtone to include speech: the primary
medium of the politician. Hence, the sound file ringtone provided new
opportunities for citizens to include political speech on their phones,
which became very common in the mid- to late 2000s. One fascinating
subgenre of political ringtones that emerged during this time is what
I termed the political voice-remix ringtone, in which a sample of a
politician speaking, often in an unguarded or unscripted way, was then
combined with a dance beat track to create a commentary on a politi-
cal event indexed by the speech sample. Two examples: first, in 2005,
Philippines President Gloria Arroyo was caught on wiretap, attempting
to confirm vote rigging in her favor from an electoral official, named
Virgilio Garcillano or Garci. A musician connected to a Filipino mobile
activism group called TXTPower combined the wiretapped recording
with a sample from 50 Cents In Da Club. The ringtone became a
national phenomenon, was downloaded millions of times, and played
a part in the unsuccessful movement to oust Arroyo from power (RD,
pp. 15260). Second, in December 2007, at the Ibero-American Summit
in Santiago, Chile, in the middle of a heated discussion, President King

Juan Carlos of Spain told Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez to shut
up: Por qu no te callas? The recording made its way into ringtones
that were both sold and freely traded throughout the Spanish-speaking
world, and had special relevance in Venezuela to the anti-Chvez con-
servative opposition (RD, pp. 16677). With its minimal dance music
background combined with the speech sample, this ringtone ended up
being quite similar to the Arroyo ringtone. However more top-down
versions of this ringtone genre also appeared, such as ringtones promoted
by Barack Obamas 2008 presidential campaign (RD, pp. 3334, n. 109).
These cultural and social changes, which can be said to result from
the technical-economic transformations in the ringtone industry,
provided a fascinating glimpse into the way that the economy affects
culture. Some phenomena, like Nokia Tune compositions, seemed to
disappear or decline as the file format of the ringtone changed; oth-
ers, like the political ringtone, experienced a new-found relevance
and thus could be said to have experienced a reversal of fortune. In
yet other cases, ringtone practices seemed to become particularized or
tailored to the specific national, cultural, and linguistic contexts in
which they were embedded, as in (for example) the way that African
American popular musicians working in R&B and hip-hop attempted to
cash in and comment on the ringtone phenomenon by writing songs
with ringtone in the very title (often with the songs simply being
titled Ringtone), thereby targeting black consumers of ringtones. The
Ringtone Dialectic presents individual chapters detailing various social
and cultural practices according to the way in which they relate to the
industrys transformation: whether they declined, experienced a posi-
tive reversal of fortunes, or became particularized in a specific part of
the world (RD, pp. xxixxiii, 536, 12931, 2013). I termed this col-
lection of dynamics the ringtone dialectic, drawing on a concept in
Hegelian and Marxist philosophy used to describe a contradictory unity
of incommensurable entities. A dialectical contradiction often contains
two definite elements that seem to be opposed to one another, like a
decline and a reversal, but a dialectical contradiction can be understood
as also containing a resolution to the opposition as well: in our exam-
ple, the particularization process, which specifies the ways in which a
technology becomes tailored to its context, might be understood as a
more general understanding of what happens to the ringtone in any
individual domain, whether it experiences a rise or fall in its fortunes
(RD, pp. xvxviii).
The ringtone dialectic, or the collection of relationships between the
ringtone industrys technical-economic shifts (as embodied in file-format
changes) and the cultural and social practices associated with the ring-
tone, turns out to be a particular version of a more general dialectic
commonly discussed within Marxist cultural theory: the relationship
between the economic base and the social, cultural, legal, and political
superstructure that seems to be founded upon it. Debates about Marxs
metaphor of the base and superstructure, as well as dogmatic adher-
ence to the idea, are replete within the literature and history of Marxist
thought, but the key issues appear to hinge upon how strongly the base
determines the superstructure and whether the metaphor is of utility at
all. I contend that it still has some value in the capitalist system, the
economy has a huge effect on so much of what happens in our lives
and my tentative solution to a complex and long-standing theoretical
problem is that one must examine the issue on a case-by-case basis, that
one ought not to force the base to appear to mechanically determine
what happens in the superstructure, and that one should instead con-
tinue to ask the question of how the base affects the superstructure, how
economy affects cultural form the two terms I use to translate base
and superstructure (RD, pp. xviiixx).
The dialectic of base and superstructure is not the only dialectical con-
tradiction at play in the book; one can be found within the economy of
the ringtone itself: specifically, the emergence of the sound file ringtone
both led to great profits for the ringtone industry, but its very fungibility
and exchangeability led it to destroy the very basis for those same prof-
its. Thus, we find a dialectical contradiction of profit and loss contained
within the potentialities of the sound file ringtone itself, a finding that
might be somewhat surprising at first glance. In fact, a number of com-
parable surprises became apparent as I researched the ringtone. Three
examples of these are as follows. First, I came to appreciate the way in
which the ringtone as a form engaged with an extensive prehistory
of short-form compositions, on the one hand, and with the sound of
functional ringer signals, on the other. These engagements were real-
ized in a wide variety of original ringtones created by Brice Salek for his
recording label Ringtone Records. In one amusing and uncanny exam-
ple, the Look Mommy Ringtone, Salek transforms his own voice into
a childs voice, periodically and slowly saying the words look Mommy,
a U.F.O. in a repetitive, almost signal-like way (RD, pp. 183200).
Second, through circumstantial evidence from Billboard Magazines ring-
tone hit-charts, comments from interlocutors in the ringtone industry,
and information from the Pew Internet & American Life Project from
2010, it quickly became evident to me that many of the primary con-
sumers of sound-file ringtones were working-class African Americans.
When one combines this fact with the awareness that ringtones were
essentially a huge rip-off, one might surmise that black consumers
disproportionately bore the costs of ringtone consumption and thus
helped to artificially boost recording industry profits at a time when
they were otherwise flagging (RD, pp. 24167). Third, I came to appre-
ciate the ways in which the technologies used to produce ringtones
specifically, single-oscillator synthesizer, MIDI synthesizer, and digital
audio-file playback technologies appeared in comparable successions
in the history of computer music using large mainframe computers,
personal computer sound cards, video game consoles, and handheld
gaming platforms before they underwent similar transformations on
mobile telephones (RD, pp. 14, 545). I also found fascinating precursors
to the earliest beeping ringtones in various early digital devices such as
the digital watch of the late 1970s and early 1980s some examples of
which played ringtone-like melodies.12
Despite its smallness and brevity, the ringtone, then, clearly con-
tained an entire world worthy of consideration, and even provided one
way of analyzing the entire world although it should go without say-
ing that all of the ringtone world, let alone the world in toto, was by no
means represented in the book, which reflects my biases towards the
US as a US-American and scholar of the US. But given that the ringtone
developed far more quickly in East Asia and Europe than in the US, as
the basis for a study of global cultural processes the ringtone provides
a fascinating lens on a world in which the US, the global hegemon,
was not the primary protagonist in the tale. But although one could
use this aspect of the ringtone to prognosticate what the future of the
world might look like a future in which the US is not the dominant
power the greater interest for me lies in the fact that the ringtone is a
historical phenomenon, drawing attention to the way that the present
immediately becomes past, and the past passes over into the realm of
history, which always merits closer inspection.
Notes
1. The figures after 2012 are a bit problematic since the RIAA stopped including
music videos, full-track downloads, and other mobile in the same category
as ringtones and ringbacks a product of the changing ecosystem of mobile
sales, which are now not as useful to differentiate from other online sales
(given the present continuity between phone and computer access to the
Internet for most users, as well as the declining relevance of phone-specific
sales portals). Nonetheless, the decreasing trend for ringtone and ringback
sales may be beginning to level off somewhat. In 2013, ringtone/ringback
sales were at $98.0 million (a decrease of $68.9 million from 2012), and in
2014, they had decreased to $66.5 million (a decrease of $31.5 million from
2013). See ibid., and RIAA, 2014. For a chart of ringtone (and other mobile)
sales from 2005 to 2011, see RD, p. 51.
2. Of course, ringtones have not disappeared from public life. As Saladin (2015)
notes, partly in reaction to my own work, Above all, however, the cultural
transformations linked to the [ringtone] phenomenon have taken on an
entirely different rhythm and lifespan to those of a mere speculative bubble
(Gopinath 2013). Today these ringtones are omnipresent in public space and
public transport, as well as in spaces (libraries, classrooms, hospitals, cinemas
and so on) in which they are banned, or rather in which an express request
is made to put mobile phones on silent, thereby revealing their ubiquity.
To my mind, Saladins argument is quite compelling, and my claims about
the death of the ringtone (see endnote 5 below and RD, pp. 4852) mainly
concern the decline of its importance as a system of capital accumulation
indeed, a speculative bubbleand as a fad. This decline has important
sociocultural consequences, including a normalized and even banalized
ubiquity. In Saladins words, Today, ringtones have lost their power to sur-
prise us. They may unexpectedly annoy us or confuse us when we mistake
them for those of our own devices, but they are now part of the set of audio
stimuli which accompany our daily movements.
3. For an informative treatment of Ranke in relation to his dictum, which
apparently is his translation of a statement of Thucydides and is thus bound
up with a classical ideal of history writing, see Grafton (1997, pp. 6771).
4. See Shklovsky (1990, p. 6), in which the sentence is translated as to make a
stone feel stony; also see Morson (1986, p. 4), in which the translation cited
above is used.
5. Jameson (1981) argues that all models of literary interpretation, including
apparently ahistoricist ones like that of the New Criticism, always imply
a whole philosophy of history (59), and one might say the same for any
arrangement of historical facts or example of history writing.
6. This could be argued in a couple of ways. For one, the fads economic death
obviates the need for prognostication, and thereby specious treading into
futurology or market reportage. In addition, the closure of the narrative not
only makes for a better story but also provides a contained phenomenon
and periodization from which one might better examine socioeconomic
and cultural dynamics. See, for example, the argument about the ringtone
conjuncture in RD, p. 273.
7. The melody continued to include the first 16 measures (or A section) of
the tune. My transcription is drawn on the source recording from Star Wars
(1977), and I cannot find a recording of the monophonic ringtone version,
although I recall it being slightly faster than the original and that the last
eighth note of the third measure (F#5) was instead an F5, tied over the
barline (and thus slightly simplifying the source melody).
8. Although since very short durations of that single sound were possible, the
monophonic ringtone offered a variety of possible effects beyond producing
melodies. See RD, 64.
9. To be clear, many phones today permit ringtones longer than 30 seconds.
(For example, the iPhones limit is presently 40 seconds, and this is easily
extended further.) However, wireless carriers usually limit the length of a

ring before diverting the call to voicemail at a maximum of 30 seconds,
sometimes less. So, even if ones ringtone were longer, a phone owner
would never hear the full length of her ringtone. Some users have devised
workarounds to secure longer ring durations, including individually calling
wireless carriers to have their maximum ring durations lengthened.
10. In addition to the primary factors of technological convergence and the eco-
nomic recession, there were two other causes for the decline of the industry.
The first was the Crazy Frog effect, or a backlash against ringtone subscrip-
tion sales scams, which were inaugurated by the Crazy Frog ringtone fad
(see RD, pp. 1479). The second was the decreasing public interest in the fad
itself, particularly as ringtones became more or less indistinguishable from
other sound files. Indeed, a part of ringtones appeal in the monophonic and
polyphonic eras, I would argue, was the nostalgic value of their technological
primitiveness, reminiscent for example of the rise of 8-bit music cultures.
11. Most of the examples discussed in the book can be found at www.theringtone
dialectic.com. Although the site is password protected, the password itself is
given at the end of the books introduction.
12. I am currently doing some follow-up research on sound in the digital watch
of the late 1970s and 1980s.
References
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Index
8-Mile 102 Apple 4, 118, 147, 176

9th Street Survival Show 91 see also: iTunes, iPod, iPhone
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends Archeologia del telefono 188
of Sleep Arnold, John 16
50-Cent 100 Astor, Patti 91, 95
80 Blocks from Tiffanys 88 Attali, Jacques 2, 127, 137,
151n14
Abramovic, Marina 106 Atton, Chris 34
acoustics 18, 67, 143, 188 Aug, Marc 155
psycho 2 Ault, Julie 89
Acquisti, A. 123 aural
Act, Internet Radio Fairness 114 history 15
Act, Telecommunications of 1996 signal 162
6, 7, 16, 26, 57 signature 28
Adorno, Theodor 170 Australia, National Library of 161
advertising 23, 27, 66, 122, 124, Authority, Metropolitan Transit 96
128, 129, 149
aesthetics 43, 44, 86, 89, 100, 103, B., Scott and Beth 91
106, 107 Band Wagon 84
Ahearn, Charlie 8, 85, 95, 97 Bannon, Liam 161, 162
Ahearn, John 90 Barlow, William 16, 17
album 36, 48, 75, 102, 113, 142, Basquiat, Jean Michel 90, 92, 935,
143, 144, 159 97, 106
release 102 Beat Street 97
release party 102 Belafonte, Harry 100
sales 148 Benjamin, Walter 41, 183
track 62, 65 Benkler, Yochai 11619
Alone Together: Why We Expect More Berliner, Paul 72, 77, 78
from Technology and Less from Each Bertoglio, Edo 8, 85, 88, 93
Other Bijsterveld, Karin 67, 154, 156
algorithm 4, 61, 64, 68, 115, 124, biopic 7, 8, 84, 87, 89, 923, 94,
125, 129, 131 967, 100, 1026
antipiracy 163 Black Box 92
computer 62 Black music 21, 75, 77, 81
information retrieval 125 Bluetooth 57, 68n2
MAX/MSP 154 Boltanski, Luc 103
mining 122 Boyz n the Hood 87
recommendation 5, 125 Braverman, Harry 187
Altman, Rick 84, 93, 157 Breathwaite, Fred 90
American Graffiti 55 Breakin 97
anarchism 89 Breakin II Electric Bugaloo 97
Andrejevic, M. 122 Brooklyn Bridge at Pearl Street 95
app, Samaritan Reader 1234 Buchanan, James 140, 150n9
195
196 Index
Bull, Michael 174 black 13, 22, 77

Burns, Ken 74 crisis 77, 82
inoperable 78
capitalism 103, 106, 108 internet 122
anti- 103 jazz 72, 77
cognitive 122, 125 local 16, 21, 22, 66
cool 36 service 19
industrial 115, 122, 169 technology and 73
late 47, 79, 86 compact disc 3, 3740, 47, 50, 56,
cassette tape(s) 3, 5, 28, 3355, 137, 134, 142, 155, 163, 186
142, 154 burner 37, 163
backups 156 CD-R 36, 42, 47, 156, 162, 164
compilation 28 DRM 163
culture 6, 34 player 57
design 39 as public good 146
master 155 writer 143
mix 3, 164 computer 37, 46, 121, 137, 141, 154,
players 40 163, 168, 191
recorders 143 algorithm 62
Store Days 36, 41 files 146
catalogs 58, 118 hard drive 134, 154, 155, 156,
CD(s) see under compact disc 161, 162, 164
Chang, Jeff 86, 87 lab 1844
Chavez, Hugo 189 music 191
Chiapello, Eve 103 playlist 23, 64
cinema 7, 8, 103, 105, 107 program 64
black 868 sound cards 191
Blaxploitation 86 tablet 183
classical 90, 92, 85, 88 technologies 19
commercial 90 Conservancy, Detroit Sound 15, 28
hip-hop 87, 88, 92, 978, 100, constitution, mutual 170
102, 107 Conway, Paul 163
independent 86 copying, music 1346, 144, 146, 163
No Wave/New 89, 903, 95, 107 copyright 3, 9, 117, 119, 141, 1467
street art and 89 infringement 134
see also: film law 147, 185
Cintron, Esperanza 17, 19, 22, 23, 28 violation 141, 143
Clan, Wu Tang 106 Cortez, Diego 91
Clarke, Erik 126 Crary, Jonathan 7980
Clear Channel 6, 268, 578, 66, Crawford, Kate 3
69n15 Cullity, Garrett 139, 148, 150n6
Coker, Cheo Hodari 102
Colab 90, 91, 95 Da Last Don 102
collectives, art 8, 8991, 105 Darwinism, social 51
see also under individual names Data, Big 122, 123
Combs, Sean Puffy 103 Davis, Miles 75, 80
Commons, Creative 117 Deadly Art of Survival, The 95
community 10, 22, 789, 82 Dead Presidents 100
art 8992 Debord, Guy 4
Index 197
deejay 3, 7, 22, 23, 55, 56, 637, 90 Enwezor, Okwui 105

black 13, 17 Eman, Nina 24
club 16
mixes 6 Facebook 3, 128, 176
radio 16, 23, 124 being-with 79
sets 3 jazz and 73, 74
streaming, absence from 64 prosumption 122
synthetic 64 user-agreement 124
Def Pictures/New Line Cinema 87 Fashion Moda 90
Deleuze 107 Featherstone, Mike 160
and Guattari 612, 69n9 Fidelity 5, 49
Denning, Michael 183 files 3, 9, 47, 1347, 144, 154, 156,
Derrida 7, 81 159, 162, 186
design 9, 38, 39, 44, 50, 51, 67, 161, computer 146
168, 185 digital 9, 138, 145, 1624
push vs. pull 3, 124, 125, 131n3 filesharing 82, 134, 186
dialectic 17, 169, 189, 190 film 86, 89, 97, 187
Dickerson, Ernest 100 avant-garde 89
digital biographical: see under biopic
age 3, 171 commercial 87, 88
communication 117 genre 95, 102
era 5, 6 high-concept 100
games 162 hip-hop 8, 89, 97, 98, 107
imagery 79 independent 85, 88
natives 164, 165 industry 98, 100
spectrum 62, 64 making 85
storage 9, 162, 164 market 90
streams 119 about musicians 8
technology 3, 4, 5, 9, 57, 161, narrative 84
162, 163 No Wave 92, 93, 95
turn 5 post-studio 106
Digital Rights Management 163 rap music 100
Disc jockey: see under deejay straight to video 102
DJ: see under deejay studio era 98
Douglas, Susan 6, 17 studies 86
download 38, 45, 47, 79, 127, 134, teen-exploitation 87
135, 137, 162 world 86
audio 182 Foundation, Freedom of the
digital 6 Press 117
store 136 Freddy, Fab 5 94, 94
see also: MP3 Fun Gallery, The 91
Downtown 81 8, 85, 8896,
106, 107 Galaxie 500 8, 11316
DRM see under: Digital Rights Get Rich or Die Trying 102
Management Ghosts I-IV 117
Duney, Serge 107 G-men 92
Goldings, Larry 76
Eins, Stefan 90 good(s)
Eminem 26 (non) excludable 136, 13949
198 Index
good(s) continued Inoperative Community, The 7

public 9, 131, 13640, 1449, iTunes 134, 135, 147
150n57, 150n18 store 4, 136, 147, 186
(non) rivalrous 136, 13949 iPhone 185, 186
music as 137 iPod 4, 56, 57, 67, 134, 1747
Google 3, 46, 124, 176
Music 3 Jack, Wolfman 28, 29, 55
Graff, Gary 24 Jansen, Bas 164
Green, Verna 24, 26, 28 Jay-Z 102, 106
Jazz is the Worst 73
Haake, Anneli 173 Jobs, Steve 135
Hackley Collection Archive 15, 18, Johnson, Ann 64
23, 25, 28 Jolson Sings Again 84
file 20, 23, 29 Jones, Prophet 28, 29
folder 23 Juice 96
Hamelin, Marc-Andr 187
Hans Groiner Plays Monk 76 Kaufman, Lindsay 177, 178
Hardin, Garrett 139 Keenan, David 406, 48, 51
headphones 10, 56, 143, 167, 168, Kelley, Frannie 148
1747, 179 Kelley, Robin D.G. 85
hearing 17, 48, 62, 64, 158, 174 Kickstarter 7, 148, 149
Hendy, David 58, 63, 64 Kirschenbaum 137, 138
Hip-Hop on Film: Performance, Korczynski, Marek 16870
Culture, Urban Space and Genre Kraftwerk 80
Transformation in the 1980s 88 Krueger, Joel 126
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Krukowski, Darren 127
Television 153 Krush Groove 85, 87, 97102, 107
historical materialism 1 Kyle, Kool 93, 94
Holsey, Steve 24, 25
Hudlin, Reginald 100 Lactations, Acrid 33
Hughes Brothers 87, 88, 100 Ladd, Jim 67
Hulu 121, 124 Larsen, S.N. 125
Hustle and Flow 102 Lee, Spike 86, 100
Le Mathieu, D.L. 158
Im Bout It 102 Lessig, Lawrence 135, 149n1
industry, mobile entertainment 10, Lewis, Dr. David 172
1856 Lewis, Joe 90
internet 3, 47, 61, 73, 78, 81, 114, Lindsay, John 96
121, 159, 186 listener(s) 2, 4, 5, 8, 20, 23, 137,
access 144, 191n1 143, 147, 149, 172
circulation 80 automobile 57, 67
communication 46 emotional states of 129
engagement 46, 79 empowered 4
era 149 as laborers 131
jazz and 73, 74, 82 radio 58
record labels, death of 73 satellite radio 5668
sociality and 73, 82 streaming music 127
social networks and 122 listening 3, 4, 34, 48, 49, 55, 121,
technology 77 127, 131, 172
intimacy, cultural 130 actively 3
Index 199
activity, as 2, 129 conglomerates 58

audience 59 consolidation 5, 107
choices 2, 125 consumption 122, 125
devices 5, 174 corporate 98, 100
digital 4 critics 6
easy 170 histories 29
experience 7, 35, 125, 126 multi- 98
format 185 politics 5
habits 58, 62, 113, 121 popular 87
history 129 scholars 17, 28
internet 175 social 3, 46, 735, 78
metadata 3, 4 sound 9
non-rivalrous 139 storage 154
online 57, 121, 130 streaming 121, 124, 125
potential 145 studies 86
practices 3, 6, 35, 55 technology 43
preferences 127 zeitgeist 35
ritual 38 mediation, technological 3, 7, 78,
streaming 125 114, 127
workplace 168, 172, 179 memory 16, 28, 81, 155, 157, 159,
Listening In 6 161, 164, 172
listening space(s) 2, 4, 56, 138 Menace II Society 87
cinema as 8 metadata 3, 4, 154, 162, 164
radio as 6, 18 Mithen, Steven 126
ringtone as 10 modernity 28
streaming service as 8 Monk, Thelonious 72, 76
Project 1, 2 Competition 72
Lowery, David 1346, 145, 147, monochrom 161
149n1 Monomania 44
LP see under: vinyl Monteyne, Kimberly 88
Lucas, George 55 Montgomery, Candice Hill 91
Lyotard, Jean-Francois 81 Moore, Alan 91
Morris, Charles 29
Manning, Bradley 116 Morton, Timothy 82
Maoism 89 movement, Free Culture 135
Marimba, iPhone 10, 188 MP3
Marisol 92 file(s) 5, 137, 159, 185
Marsalis, Wynton 74, 75, 77 player 35, 56, 57, 121
Marx, Karl 190 collection 62, 127
marxist Mudd Clubb 93
cultural studies 183 Mulligan, Mark 136, 147, 150n2
philosophy 189 Musgrave, Richard 138
theory 183, 190 music 3, 31, 34, 38, 40, 42, 45, 48,
thought 190 56, 59, 72, 76, 81, 103, 119, 124,
Master-P 102 131, 135, 147, 156, 160, 170
McDonald, Glenn 61 American 97
media 2, 5, 17, 107, 116, 117, 142, background 176
154, 160, 162, 163, 164, 185 Black-American 74, 75
archivists 156 black 77
campaigns 99 business 11618
200 Index
music continued preference 128, 129

club 102 score 3, 127, 154
collection 47, 56 subgenres 5, 7, 56, 59
commercial 5, 85 tastes 40, 127, 182
computer 46, 191 musical genres
consumption 40, 48, 62, 64 alternative 59
digital 6, 13440, 142, 144, 145, avant-garde 35, 72
1479, 154 Baroque 172
degree 76 classical 1, 5, 59, 60, 172, 175, 187
delivery 57 dance 81, 170
improvised 34, 44, 77 electronic 17
independent 35 hip-hop 8, 16, 59, 75, 849, 92,
industrial 35, 40, 445 958, 100, 1058, 189
industries 51, 100, 113, 116, jazz 5, 7, 26, 59, 60, 61, 7283, 76,
118, 127 78, 82
history 28, 61, 63, 64, 75 noise 34, 40, 44
journalists 94 No Wave 89, 923, 95, 105
making 52, 106, 147 punk 5, 45, 89, 90, 92, 105, 116
materialization of 127 rap 61, 87, 89, 97, 98, 100, 102,
non-diegetic 99 1056
non-western 49 musicians 33, 43, 45, 51, 72, 77, 78,
online 3, 121, 128 81, 113, 114, 138, 147
performance 84 African-American 190
popular 34, 40, 45, 61, 62, contemporary 72
1589, 171 DIY 46
recorded 116, 162, 185 postmodern 74
stations 59, 64 postpunk 93
streaming 5, 38, 45, 64, 113, 115 royalties and 114, 127
taped 33, 40, 50 musicking 35, 127, 131
theory 11, 183 Musicking: The Meanings of Performing
transnational 46 and Listening 3
underground 42, 89 Music While you Work 170
videos 86, 98, 100, 182, 191n1 Muzak 170
work and 16873, 178 My Name is Mary Brown 171
world 6, 64 MySpace 124
20th century 15
musical(s) 84, 88, 93, 100 Nancy, Jean-Luc 7, 778
acts 5, 98 Napster 117, 1348, 144
behavior 126 National Association of Black Media
boundaries 64 Producers (NABMP) 21
commodity 100, 102, 1067, National Association of Television and
137, 170 Radio Announcers (NATRA) 13
embodiment 136, 142, 143, 145 Netflix 121, 124
engagement 122, 123 network(s)
experience 84, 88, 93, 100 alternative art 91, 95
identities 121, 128, 130 era 18
knowledge 77 models 118
labor 85, 105 peer-to-peer 135, 136, 138, 1448,
library 47, 136, 138, 159 see also Napster
Index 201
piracy 136 phones, cell/mobile 35, 174, 182,

social 5, 7, 73, 78, 80, 122, 184, 185, 186, 188
123, 127 131n1, see also under Phonograph(y) 143, 156
individual names Picasso Baby 106
New Jack City 100 Pinker, Steven 126
New York/New Wave Show 91 pleasure 52, 66, 127, 169
Newman, Kathy 14, 15 Polgreen, Lydia 58
Nietzsche, Friedrich 155 Pop Art 90
noise 10, 59, 173, 176 postcolonial 21
avant-garde 33, 42 print 50, 56, 115, 117, 141, 156
background 65 Prior, Nick 45
making 34, 42 privacy
music 33, 34, 40, 42, 44, 45, 52, 89 musical 8, 121, 123, 129
Nokia Tune 10, 1879 policy 129, 130
nostalgia 16, 26, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, car and 67
56, 66, 96, 106 work and 168, 176, 179
Notorious 1023, 107 property 138, 1412
No Wave digital 119
cinema 89, 107 intellectual 47, 160
gallery owners 95 private 1368, 1409, 150n5
music 89, 923, 95, 1056 prosumption 8, 122, 125, 130
object, medium-sized 136, 137, 1427 Quinones, Lee 90, 94, 95

OBrien, Glenn 92
Office Space 167 radio 6, 17, 19, 219, 55, 64, 68,
Once Upon a Time in Shaolin 106 98, 114
ontology, music 142 advertising 124
AM 12, 65
Pandora 8, 124, 125, 136 black 13, 1516, 21, 23, 25
data collection 128, 130 broadcast 124, 131n3
earnings 11516 car 65
royalties 11315 commercial-free 66
major labels 118 cultural space, as 16
playlist 62 diversity 58
privacy policy 129 FM 17, 64
satellite radio 57 Formatting 59
service 127 history 1618
surveillance 125 imagination, and 17
Payton, Nicholas 74, 75, 77 non-terrestrial 114
Peppermint Lounge, The 93 operations 19
performance 1, 2, 5, 44, 84, 88, 89, over-the-air 579, 66
93, 94, 99, 100, 142, 187 rock 67
black 17 satellite 7, 559, 60, 623, 658,
hip-hop 85 69n15
live 34, 48 stations 13, 17, 24, 55, 69n11,
practices 130 124, 175, see also under individual
stage 102 names
work 171 streaming services 5, 127
Petty, Tom 64, 65 strike 12
202 Index
radio continued rights 2, 4, 114, 118, 135, 141

talk 66 civil 65
taping 367 holder 118
work and 167, 170, 175 property 9
Rainey, Lee 175 ringtone(s) 10, 18291
Ranke, Leopold 183 African-American music and 189
rappers 26, 86, 95 conjuncture 192n6
Rappin 97 economics of 1856, 18990
Rdio 127 fad/novelty 182, 183
Real Estate Show, The 90 industry 188
Realism, New Black 87, 88 labor 1867
record: see under vinyl political 18890
Recordings, Def Jam 98 subscription 187, 193n10
recordings 26, 42, 9, 113, 114, 116, see also under individual names
124, 153, 155, 156, 158, 162, 163, Ringtone Dialectic, The 10, 182, 189
164, 185, 187, 188, 189, 192n7 Ringtone Waltz, The 187
analog 159, 163 Rizzoli 93
curated 157 Rome 78 92
digital 9, 159, 1604 Rose, Tricia 85, 100
diy 44 Ross, Andrew 9, 51
DRM 163 Rubbish Theory 158
early 157, 160, 163 Run DMC 98, 99, 100, 102, 103
equipment 45
historical 156, 164 Salek, Bruce 190
illegal 159 Samuelson, Paul 138
industry 45, 127, 185, 186, 191 Sanchez, David 77
lost 158, 159, 163 scenes 6, 33, 42, 46
multitrack 154 film 93, 99
new 118 Schultz, Michael 8, 85, 87, 98
old 157, 163 Sciarrino, Salvatore 188
sound 154, 1569, 163 Shes Gotta Have It 87
studio 93 Shklovsky, Viktor 183
tape 27, 40 Sidney Janis Gallery 97
technology 156 signature, aural 28
Records signature, sonic 17
A&M 22 Silence 13, 26, 177
Atlantic 44 Silver, Tony 88, 89
Bad Boy 102 Simmons, Russell 98
CBS 22 Singer, Natasha 127, 128
Motown 15, 17, 20, 27 Singing in the Rain 84
Representing: Hip-Hop Culture and the Singleton, John 87, 88, 100
Production of Black Cinema 86 SiriusXM 7, 55, 589, 623, 668
reproduction commodification 66
cultural 160 nostalgia 66
digital 7 Sirmins, Franklin 95
sound 5 Sisario, Ben 114
Retrieval, Human Information 125 Small, Christopher 34, 127, 131
rhythm 76, 169, 170 Smart, James R. 157
Ricoeur, Paul 155 SMeS, see streaming media services
Index 203
Smithereens 92 scholars 157

SMuS, see streaming music services theorist 172
Smyntek, John 26 SoundCloud 3, 28, 47, 124
Smythe, Dallas 124 soundscape 9, 15, 16, 28, 60, 182
social network(s) 5, 73, 80, 122, 127 soundtrack 34, 52, 55, 65, 98, 99,
culture 78 102, 173
jazz 7 space, exilic 130
personal information 122, 131n1 Spalding, Esperanza 72, 77
see also under individual names speech 116, 153, 182, 189
songs 35, 49, 56, 63, 64, 103, 114, Spotify 3, 5, 8, 45, 56, 57, 136
124, 125, 127, 129, 134, 143, 144, advertisement 12021
145, 149, 154, 159, 185, 189 business model 116, 11819, 127
cover 185 consumption 124
cycle 171 playlist 62
digital 138 user-agreement 12930
folk 170 Stations of the Elevated 86
list 121 Steding, Walter 94
pop 170, 182 Steinberg, Martha Jean 13, 17, 22, 29
royalties 114 Sterne, Jonathan 97, 137, 138
strong 25 streaming media services 121,
taped 37, 48 124, 125
token 145, 146 streaming music services 57, 15,
types 145, 147 38, 45
work 169 car 68
writers 113, 114, 170 free 116, 119
writing 13 economics and 125, 149
sonic 40, 100 as listening space 3, 8
aporias 16 royalties and 11314
engagement 2 satellite radio and 55, 57, 634
isolation 56 service 127
landscape 68 third phase of digital music 136
phenomenon 189 see also under individual names
qualities 6 Streets is Watching 102
signature 17 Style Wars 88
space 67 Swalwell, M. 161, 162
treat 182 Szendy, Peter 2, 4
verisimilitude 103
wallpaper 65 tape(s) see under cassette tapes
sound 2, 9, 16, 20, 40, 44, 52, 56, Taylor, Philip M. 15355, 16162, 164
100, 142, 156, 172, 174, 182, 184 Taylor, T.D. 1, 2
archives 52, 159, 163 technology 4, 55, 56, 59, 61, 175, 189
cards 191 broken 43
effect 184 cinema 93
fidelity 5 contemporary 78
files 9, 154, 18490 digital 35, 9, 163
media 9 downloading 135
quality 49, 65 Internet 77
recording 154, 15660, 162 journalists 186
reproduction 5, 39 new 53n2, 57, 69n12
204 Index
technology continued lost 156

radio 17 popular 158
recording 89, 159
satellite 7, 64 Walkman (Sony) 34, 35, 53n4
streaming 68, 124 Walk the Line 102
surveillance 123 Wallace, Christopher 102
tape recording 40, 53n8 as Notorious B.I.G. 1023
theft, musical 105, 136, 138 Warner, Julian 125
file sharing as 1345, 143, 145 Warshaw Collection 160
They Eat Scum 92 Watkins, Craig S. 86, 87, 88
third world-ism 89 Web 2.0 8, 103, 122, 125
Thompson, Margo 91 Weis, Gary 88, 89
Thompson, Michael 158 Whiplash 76
Thousand Plateaus, A 61 White, Jessica 1346, 145, 149n1
Tillman, George 102 WikiLeaks 11617
Times Square Show 90, 91, 95 Wild Style 85, 8792, 957, 1057
Torres, Rigoberto 90 Williams, Hype 100
Tougher Than Leather 87 Winston, Brian 43
Turkle, Sherri 7880 WJLB 6, 1519, 214
Twins 95 advertisment 201, 23
Clear Channel and 27
Underground USA 92 Eminem and 26
Green, Verna and 24, 26
VanIJzendoorn 154 Johnson, Electrifying Mojo and
voice(s) 4, 10, 98, 161, 167, 173, 234, 267
188, 190 owners: Booth Sr., John 1820,
of the dead 156, 158 Booth II, John 212, 26
neo-soul 34 programming 20
political 17 strike 12, 20, 21, 26
regional 29 T., Billy and 26
Voice Over: The Making of Black WWJ, as 17
Radio 16
vinyl 3, 4, 5, 23, 24, 27, 37, 38, 40, Xingtone 186
50, 100, 11316, 127, 137, 142,
146, 156 YouTube 4, 5, 74, 76, 119,
collection 49 121, 124
consumption 49
damaged 9 Zalcberg, Blake 176
diy 44 Zenon, Miguel 77
elitism and 49 Zweig, Michael 168, 178

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List of Figures vii

Introduction: Listening in on the 21st Century 1

11 Researching the Mobile Phone Ringtone: Towards

1.1 Mackey, R. (1971) Employee Sit-In Silences

Richard Purcell is Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon

Richard Randall is the Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor of Music

Kieran Curran recently completed his PhD on The Cynic in Post

Carleton Gholz is Lecturer in Communication Studies at Oakland

Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at

His writings on Steve Reich, musical minimalism, Marxism and music

Margret Grebowicz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Goucher

Graham Hubbs is an Assistant Professor in the University of Idahos

Damon Krukowski studied at Harvard University. He was the drummer

Kathy M. Newman is Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon

Jeffrey Roessner is Dean of the Arts and Humanities at Mercyhurst

Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and

This anthology is the result of a scholarly collaboration we started in

Here, we looked to Christopher Smalls term musicking as a guide

musical subjectivity; one that is an aggregate of all of our musicking and

the collection frame that point of intersection by focusing variously

of production and distribution albeit a move that is accompanied by

present music and its related activities as un-alienated labor. Despite

essay complements Krukowskis essay to create a broader critique of

and mainstream journalistic press accounts of the effects of music at

We sway the minds of our community and if we cant

While [sic] all the daily tales of defaulting cities, pro-

They say radio is war. It may be a physical war, but

In the E. Azalia Hackley Collections Detroit Radio subject file at the

director Al Perkins had been fired (Wittenberg, 1970). Detroit News

and, led to the increased participation of Memphis African Americans

Why is this narrative of the classical network era to the convergence

who experienced the citys numerous ballrooms and clubs, listened

Especially since the late 1940s, when it emerged as African Americans

Despite Barlows confident claims, cultural spaces like radio continue to

This makes WJLB a compelling point of entry for an understanding

19411967: Designed for the Future

According to Detroit Free Press (1941b), on March 10, 1941 Governor

It wasnt impressive to look at. Just an L-shaped arrangement of gray

on them. There was a series of clicks, wheels turned, lights blinked

19671981: From Playing it Cool to the Sophisticated

The Hackley file contains a full-page advertisement from the Detroit

This adjustment signals an overall change in the stations concept

Cintron continues, by hand, on the back of her notes:

Additional marketing sheets discussed the stations award winning

19821999: Strong Songs

And then there was Mojo.

2000Present: Long Memories

1995). In 1997, WCHB moved from jazz to urban, hiring a number of

Epilogue: Insomnia in Detroit

I was in Ann Arbor standing on the corner of Stadium and University

be pleasing in your sight? You like to go here? This is where I like to

It was cold and damp at 2 am when I started to drive to Farmington

This experience, among others, pushed me in 2012 to form the Detroit

songs that are guaranteed to make any normal teenager wiggle.

Detroit Free Press. (1941a) FM Broadcasts Begun by WJLB. May 12.

Holsey, S. (1988) Readers Make Selections in Favorite Deejay Survey. Michigan

The following piece is based around my interest in exploring the pecu-

There will never be any peace...