Is Capitalism the Future of Music?

I know, I’m hardly the first person to weigh in on the future of music, but I spent the weekend at the Experience Music Project‘s annual POP Conference (the short story: it was amazing, truly amazing), and it got me thinking…

Although the leitmotif of the conference (for me) was the role of the military in developing sound technology (from the telephone to the vocoder), perhaps a more significant shadow fell over the conference in the form of Robert Chrisgau‘s question from a panel on Saturday morning, “Where is the money?”

It’s the question on everybody’s mind — or at least the minds of anyone who cares about popular music. Declining record sales, shrinking record labels, digital downloading and so on have sent the industry into paroxysms of doubt, worry, and anxiety about the future.

So, here’s my question: is capitalism the future of music?

David Byrne's vision of the future of music

Here’s my proposition: no.

Maybe popular music ought to take a cue from the other avenues for the arts, and maybe the former “consumers” of popular music might do well to reconceptualize their role as “patrons of the arts” instead. Instead of buying albums, they should invest in art. This is not a pretense but a shift in thinking about the relationship between consumers, producers and the art that mediates that relationship.

Maybe record labels ought to take a cue from micro-loan funds and other art-related non-profits. If they’re not making any money in this racket, maybe they ought to simply cop to that and become proper not-for-profit ventures that appeals to members and contributions rather than customers.

It’s a thought, and maybe not even a good one, but the underlying assumption that popular music ought to be a commercial product first and foremost has clearly been exposed as an historical contingency — if not by sagging music sales, than by David Suisman’s fine book. And maybe the problem lies not in the mechanisms of music production and sales, but in the industry that created them.

Consider it the kickstarter model for popular music — and maybe if we start thinking of music as art, it just might occasionally rise to that level.