Keynote 3: Infrastructures

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach to the study of digital music, by adopting a well-established method of world-systems theory: commodity- or value-chain analysis. Formulated to track shifts in the global division of labor and across the longue durée, prioritizing the differential apportionment of surplus value across vast territorial expanses and differential functions in the production process, this framework has proven insightful in light of the complex reticulations that supply chains have undergone since the 1980s, a development facilitated by advances in digital media and technologies. 

Applied to music, commodity chain analysis illustrates how digital music has increasingly been integrated into many physical objects, not just playback media like compact discs, but also such seemingly mundane commodities as musical toys or (to cite our case study) musical greeting cards. The card in question—“No Big Deal,” published by Hallmark, featuring an excerpt from American Authors’ 2013 song “Best Day of My Life”—exemplifies this trend, being the product of a number of intersecting commodity chains: card stock, ink, and embedded integrated circuits and electronic components (microprocessors, storage devices, LEDs, small speakers). However, the “No Big Deal” card is not just a tangible good requiring production, storage, and shipment for exchange on the market. The card also embodies a number of so-called “intangibles,” a broad category including copyrights, patents, and trademarks, whose commercial status is largely a function of intellectual property law. We call this an “asset chain,” which should be understood as working in parallel with commodity chains. By highlighting the point at which these two distinct value chains converge, this paper makes a contribution to both music studies and world-systems analysis. If the latter has been attentive to the movement of physical goods across the striated space of global capitalism, it has arguably neglected the role of assets and assetization in contributing to both the use- and the sign-value of finished products. Conversely, music studies has long documented the changing fates of music as intellectual property, but until recently has paid less attention to the material base upon which this musico-legal superstructure is constructed.

Biographies

Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He has written or co-edited books on the ringtone industry (The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form, 2013), mobile music studies (The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, 2014), and the music of Steve Reich (Rethinking Reich, 2019). He is the leader of the independent Americana band The Gated Community.