Relationship Between American and Non American Media Discussion

Recorded MusicThe History of Recorded Music
• the acoustic era (1877-1923)
• the electrical era (1924-1960s)
• the cassette era (1970-1982)
• the tangible digital era (1983-2000)
The History of Recorded Music
• the acoustic era (1877-1923)
“Before the prominence of musical recordings, the act of producing and
consuming music relied on the sale of composers’ sheet music by
publishers, as well as live performances of those compositions.”
–André Sirous and Janet Wasko
The Acoustic Era
• 19c/early 20c
• sheet music
• notations of songs
• amateurs performed live
• two markets
• stage performance and song
publication
The Acoustic Era
• new technologies for mechanical record and reproduction of audio
• the phonograph
• the gramophone
• new industry of recorded music
The Acoustic Era
• recorded music vs. live music
• performers vs. songwriters
“The recording has become the true representation of the music; the
concert has become the faithful reproduction of the ‘authentic’ recorded
music.”
–P. David Marshall
The Acoustic Era
• gramophone → mass reproduction of
music
• one-way flow of musical content
• companies → consumers
The Acoustic Era
• gramophone → professionalization of musical production
• music → something to be consumed as commodity
“[With the mass production of musical recordings,] music began to
become a thing.”
–Evan Eisenberg
The History of Recorded Music
• the electrical era (1924-1960s)
The Electrical Era
• new technical innovations
• electric means of recording music
• fidelity and quality of sound 📈
• radio
• new medium
• competed with gramophone
• “free” to listeners
“…radio was cutting into the business and the record industry had to
compete with broadcasting or join it. Finding a market for the sale of
records when consumers could get the music free from radio proved to
be a challenge.”
–André Sirous and Janet Wasko
The Electrical Era
• radio → recording music industries
• songs played on radio → record sales 📈
• recording music companies → new music to radio
The Electrical Era
• 1950s
• long-playing microgroove records
(LPs)
• 7” 45rpm single discs
• cheaper to produce
• independent record companies 📈
The Electrical Era
• majors
• vertically integrated
• distribution outlets for selling and airing music
• retail stores, radio stations
“…by the end of the 1950s, market domination was firmly in control of
those firms with distribution power. Thus…the most profItable
companies controlled distribution – the means by which a recording
made its way to retailers and ultimately into the hands of the consumer.”
–André Sirous and Janet Wasko
The History of Recorded Music
• the cassette era (1970-1982)
The Cassette Era
• 1960s
• cassette tapes
• users could personalize music
consumption
The Cassette Era
• consumers → curation of music
• “mixtapes”
The Cassette Era
• 1980s
• Music Television Network (MTV) and
music videos
• visual representation of recording artists
📈
• horizontal integration → cross-promotion
between music and TV
The History of Recorded Music
• the tangible digital era (1983-2000)
The Tangible Digital Era
• 1980s
• compact disc (CD)
• superior sound quality
• limited reproducibility
“The introduction of the CD also led to an industry revelation: exploiting
copyrights attached to old recordings could be very profitable. Because
of this epiphany, the large entertainment conglomerates realized the
inherent value of owning large back catalogs of music.”
–André Sirous and Janet Wasko
The Tangible Digital Era
• biggest companies → smaller companies → music catalogues
• diversity 📉
• volume 📉
The Tangible Digital Era
• 2000s
• CD-Rs and duplication hardware
• consumer knowledge 📈
“For the first 110 years of recorded music, the primary commodities
produced by the industry were physical objects, which allowed the major
companies to maintain control over the material production and
distribution of records.”
–André Sirous and Janet Wasko
The Tangible Digital Era
• 2000s
• MP3s
• no physical medium
• piracy 📈
The Tangible Digital Era
• control over distribution of copyrighted
media 📉
• entertainment industries → slow to develop
new distribution platforms and technologies
• file-sharing + other means 📈
• paying less (or nothing) for media 📈
The Tangible Digital Era
• 2003
• Apple iTunes Store → legal, authorized
digital distribution system
• transition from sale of physical copies to
digital copies of media
The Tangible Digital Era
• digital formats → $ of music
“…trading analog dollars for digital pennies.”
– Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal
The History of Recorded Music
• the digital era (2000-present)
music consumers
The Digital Era
• privatization and personalization of
music consumption 📈
• smartphone and streaming services
The Cloud, Copies, and Streams
• today
• subscription-based streaming services
📈
• licenses to stream music 🆚 personal
ownership of music
The Digital Era
• playlists 📈 algorithms 📈
• data-driven
“The system ingests and analyzes the mp3, working to understand
every single event in the song, such as a note in a guitar solo or the way
in which two notes are connected….It then makes connections between
that song and other song with similar progressions or structures.”
-Brian Whitman, co-founder/CTO of Echo Nest (data analytics firm purchased by Spotify)
The Digital Era
• music consumption decoupled from albums and radio
• determined not by recording music (or radio) industry, but by tech
companies
The Digital Era
• musicians and recording artists → digital
distribution
• in the past
• artists → contract → label
• artists → advances (payments)
The Digital Era
• label
• production and sale of albums
• parent company’s distribution
• artist
• pay back advances → royalties on sales
• surrender ownership of rights to distribution of music
• “master records” or “masters”)
The Digital Era
• 2010s
• YouTube, Vine, MySpace
• artists → discovered by recording music
industry
• e.g., Justin Bieber, Shawn Mendes, Ed
Sheeran
The Digital Era
• new platforms → distribution outside of
traditional recording industry
• leverage 📈 negotiating with record labels
The Digital Era
• lower production costs of recorded music
• cost of professional-grade setups 📉
The Digital Era
• Spotify, Apple Music, etc. → price of music 📉
• recording artists → costs of living 📈
The Digital Era
• digital technologies and platforms
• empowerment of music consumers and artists vs. recording music
industry
• dependence and exploitation by tech firms
“While the cost of access has decreased dramatically for the tools to
create and market your own work, it also drastically devalues the
resulting music to the point that it almost cancels out any chances there
might have been to allow more people to use it as a profession.”
– Craig ‘Comrade’ Massie
CIJ 3 (3) pp. 221–235 Intellect Limited 2010
Creative Industries Journal
Volume 3 Number 3
© 2010 Intellect Ltd Major Papers. English language. doi: 10.1386/cij.3.3.221_1
RAYNA DENISON
University of East Anglia
Transcultural creativity in
anime: Hybrid identities in
the production, distribution,
texts and fandom of Japanese
anime
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS
This article seeks to examine some of the overlooked transcultural aspects and elements
of creativity in anime. Through a series of contemporary case studies, it is argued that
anime supports an array of transcultural creative practices that span across borders,
hybridize content and even force the creation of new types of text and distribution. The
attention to the transcultural here is an attempt to move beyond discussions of how
Japanese anime are, and to open up a space in which to discuss their relevance beyond
their home nation. In these ways, the creative work undertaken by those within and
beyond the industries related to anime is demonstrating the global reach of Japanese
cultural products.
anime
transcultural
creative work
piracy
Emma: A Victorian
Romance
Afro Samurai
Creativity, in relation to media texts, takes on multiple potential forms when
considered through a transcultural lens. It can refer to the original makers
of media products writing, filming or, indeed, animating products in ways
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that deny the centrality of their originating cultures. These hybrid-identified
products can then be sold across cultures, and can be made sense of in
terms of translinguistic and transnational regional promotions and sales,
creating what Charles Acland calls ‘mutating commodities’ (2003: 23).
Additionally, transcultural creativity can take place after those originating
moments, in the times and spaces between ‘legitimate’ cultural flows, as
when groups of fans take up the mantle of creative re-producer, in order to
fill gaps in transnational media flows (see Lee 2011, in this issue). Creativity
in this sense, then, is not just about making media products, but about their
continual recreation as they travel around the world. Therefore, this article
is concerned with examining how Japan’s creative industries act as, and
interact with, global ‘re-producers’ of their texts, from the overseas firms
distributing anime, to the fan groups who turn re-producers of anime. The
methods employed here are qualitative, and based in the analysis of a range
of discourses produced by the creative industries involved with anime, and
their fans. Through these means, this article challenges essentialist notions of
anime as either intrinsically ‘Japanese’ or intrinsically ‘mukokuseki’ (stateless),
seeking instead to look for the discursive moments in which anime cross
between cultures. In this study, moments of cultural and creative mediation
are therefore taken as focal points in order to open up a space in which to
debate the relative impact of transcultural creative practices on the anime
industries, and, consequently, to analyse how such transcultural practices
challenge the ways in which anime has been conceptualized.
Considerations of trans- phenomena litter contemporary academic work.
This article attempts to distinguish between cultural and national variations
on the trans- theme, because doing so enables greater understanding of the
difference between a media product from a particular (inter)national background, and the global or transnational cultures that become attached to it.
David MacDougall, in Transcultural Cinema, offers a useful definition in relation to ethnographic films, which he claims ‘have been widely understood as
transcultural, in the familiar sense of crossing cultural boundaries – indeed
the very term implies an awareness and mediation of the unfamiliar – but
they are also transcultural in another sense: that of defying such boundaries’
(1998: 245). The notion of cultural boundaries is a useful one to this study,
because it suggests that media may not just be produced for one domestic
market, but, rather, for diasporic audiences, for subcultures in other nations,
for regional cultures and for audiences who join in what Matt Hills, following Benedict Anderson (1983), has termed the ‘communities of imagination’
(2002: 180) that gather around media texts.
In this way then, anime becomes not just a set of texts emanating from
a Japanese cultural centre, but rather a culture of interconnected industries
and (prosumer-) consumers (Toffler 1980). This amorphous ‘culture’ of anime
can be considered in line with the cultural ‘contact zones’ outlined by Henry
Jenkins, wherein ‘unpredictable and contradictory meanings […] get ascribed
to […] images as they are decontextualised’ (2006: 154) during global circulation. Likewise, the creativity required to enhance cultural transferability
and to resituate those increasingly decontextualized images is the central
concern here. It is the resulting transculture(s) of anime that this article seeks
to unpack by examining some brief case studies that have emerged out of
research undertaken in Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States
between 2007 and the present. The case studies are grouped around industrial, textual and fan discourses and around the potentially transcultural anime
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Transcultural creativity in anime
(re)production that has taken place during this period. These groupings are
intended to cover a range of synchronic moments in different kinds of transcultural creativity, providing examples of how some anime texts are created
to be, or are re-made as, transcultural objects. The examples chosen are sometimes extreme, though instructive, cases, or are cases that exemplify a particular trend. Neither sort of example is intended to stand in for the entirety of
anime (re)production practices, but rather, it is hoped that their presentation
herein might suggest areas where further work on the transcultural nature of
anime might be undertaken.
GLOBAL ANIME?: MEDIA MARKETS, TRANSCULTURAL CREATIVITY
AND FLOW
Perhaps the most purposeful type of transcultural exchange in anime takes
place between the Japanese producers of these media texts and their American
industrial counterparts, who buy their products, translate them and then
distribute them to the English-speaking marketplace (now often globally,
thanks to Internet DVD sales). To focus on this kind of anime distribution
requires some sense of where and in what forms anime travels. In this respect,
anime distribution patterns are perhaps most easily understood in relation to
the hierarchy of markets through which they move. For anime, the domestic Japanese market remains the primary market, where the vast majority of
anime are still produced and distributed (JETRO 2005). Differentiating which
countries and geo-linguistic regions form secondary and tertiary markets is,
however, more problematic. Economic indicators such as distribution revenues provide only part of a larger picture of active fan cultures, not all of
which partake of legally distributed anime. Historically though, anime have
had an important cultural presence in mainland Europe, perhaps especially
in France and Italy (and through Italy to Spain), and there are also developed
markets for anime in Australia and New Zealand, as well as markets based
around diasporic Japanese populations in parts of South and North America.
However, historically, it has been companies based in the United States that
have nurtured links with the Japanese industry, and have worked to speed the
negotiation of rights to secondary market distribution of Japanese anime.
Distribution deals therefore offer a complex understanding of how, and to
what extent, anime is becoming a transcultural set of phenomena. An interesting case of discord can be found in the control exercised by the Japanese
producers over rights to merchandising. For example, the high-profile Disney–
Tokuma deal of 1996 (see http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/disney/) enabled
Studio Ghibli (through its then parent company Tokuma Shoten) to retain the
licensing rights to merchandise. This effectively created a vacuum in merchandising around Studio Ghibli’s films in the United States. Whereas in Japan,
there are several stores that specialize in Studio Ghibli merchandising in
Tokyo alone, and Ghibli merchandising can be found in most toy and department stores (specialist stores are, e.g., located in the Ghibli museum, at Tokyo
Station and in Asakusa next to one of Tokyo’s most famous tourist attractions),
this is not the case in the United States, where Ghibli merchandise has had to
be imported from Asia, rather than being produced directly through American
licensing deals. This case offers an intriguing contrast to the other major
Japanese success of the period: Pokémon (1996–). In the case of the Pokémon
franchise it would seem that parent company Nintendo’s American presence
enabled the franchise to capitalize on the potential profits to be reaped from
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Rayna Denison
1. English-language
titles will be used
throughout, except
to clarify between
Japanese and Englishlanguage versions of
texts, and Japanese
names are given in
English-language order,
i.e. forename, surname.
licensing and tie-ins (Iwabuchi 2004: 66–67). Comparatively then, the transcultural flow of Studio Ghibli’s extratextual and epiphenomenal networks beyond
Asia has been halting, and their transcultural presence has been purposely
limited by the Japanese creative producers.
Despite the control exercised by the Japanese creators, however, even the
high-profile anime of Studio Ghibli can be considered mutated commodities
in the United States. Translated and re-dubbed with star voice casts, Studio
Ghibli’s films have become enmeshed within new cultural systems of stardom, and even authorship (Denison 2008). The evidence suggests that this
process has been an experimental one, with different behind-the-scenes
authors working on different films, perhaps most famously John Lasseter, who
oversaw the reproduction of Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi into Spirited Away
(Hayao Miyazaki, 2001).1 The result in relation to voice-casting is telling in
that Disney began by using big star names [e.g. Kirsten Dunst in the title role
in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)] until the relative failure of Princess Mononoke
(1997). This led to a system that appears to have normalized around the use
of star groupings ranged across demographics. For example, Ponyo (2008)
features stars who range in age, from Frankie Jonas and Noah Cyrus, both
then aged eight, and both younger siblings of stars from the Disney stable, to
Betty White and Cloris Leachman, both in their 80s at the time of production.
Moreover, these star groupings tend to range across film and television and
across demographics. For example, Tina Fey, who played Lisa (protagonist
Sosuke’s mother) in the American version of Ponyo, is probably most famous
for her writing and starring role in television show 30 Rock (2006–), whereas
co-stars Liam Neeson, Matt Damon and Cate Blanchett are probably better
known for their film roles. In their use of what I have discussed elsewhere as
‘star constellations’ (2008), Disney have begun to promote Studio Ghibli films
as prestige productions with transcultural appeal to the markets for American
film and television, as well as to the markets for animation and anime.
In making anime more American, the case of Disney and Ghibli highlights
how post-production creative work can alter the cultural appeal of anime
texts. This can also be seen in the work of American distribution companies in
translating and redubbing anime television shows for broadcasting and release
online and on DVD. However, the picture is bigger than this suggests, with
American and Japanese companies now beginning to work more closely with
one another to produce purposefully transcultural products., It would seem as
though the American market is still beyond the reach of Japanese producer–
distributors at times, given that their partnerships tend to end at core media
products, rather than extending to the merchandising and direct promotion so
important within the domestic Japanese market.
This has been so much the case that a recent boom in global anime distribution and fandom, which has its highest-profile examples in the late 1990s
distribution deals between Disney and Studio Ghibli and the successful distribution of the Pokémon television series (Denison 2006; Tobin 2004), has seen
American non-anime producers begin to involve themselves more actively
in anime production. High profile examples of the former can be found in the
anime inserts into films like Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) and in straight-to-DVD
ancillary products such as Batman: Gotham Knight (2008) (which was animated
by some of Japan’s most famous studios including Madhouse Animation and
Studio 4°C). However, perhaps the best and most extreme example of recent
transcultural industrial convergence is one that inverts the distribution norms
of anime: Afro Samurai (2007, 2009).
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Transcultural creativity in anime
Born out of anime studio Gonzo’s desire to penetrate the American
marketplace, the concept of Afro Samurai was reportedly taken by one of their
American-born executives to American producers (Strike 2007). Subsequently,
cable channel ‘Spike TV’ picked up the option to produce the series, but only
after Samuel L. Jackson announced he would be involved as the voice of the
central character, and as an executive producer for the series. Transcultural
production in this instance at least has been reported to be a result of key
creative personnel coming together in Japan and America (Takashi Okazaki,
the creator, and Jackson, the performer). Afro Samurai first aired on ‘Spike TV’
in America, and also on their website, taking ten months to filter through to
Japanese distribution on ‘Fuji Television’ in October 2007, thereby inverting
the usual distribution pattern for anime that begins in Japan and usually takes
considerable time to reach secondary markets outside Asia (Strike 2007; for
more co-productions, see Clayton and Ciolek 2008). While international creative convergence is not unusual in animation production, with Japanese and
South Korean firms regularly doing ‘in-betweening’ work on American animation, the flow in the opposite direction is less well mapped. Afro Samurai’s
distinctiveness, therefore, can be seen in the circularity of creative flows that
went from Japan to America and back again.
High profile examples of this kind of transcultural, or at least inter-cultural,
creative planning are becoming increasingly common. Two trends are becoming visible within creative intercultural planning: first, moves by American
companies to hire Japanese creative talent and to reproduce Japanese
aesthetic styles; and in examples where creative work from Japan is bought-in
by American entertainment businesses.
Where Afro Samurai might offer an example of the latter, the former can
be found, for example, in the Japanese arm of Disney television (Walt Disney
Television International Japan) entering into a co-production deal with the
high-profile Toei Animation studio in order to produce new CGI-led content.
These new anime-inflected shows by Toei are now being shown as a ‘local’
product on Disney’s Japanese television channels, such as ‘Toon Disney’. One
such show, RoboDz Kazagumo Hen/RoboDz (2008), though it first aired in Japan,
is more properly perhaps a transnational anime project, having also been
screened in the United States, with its shorter title RoboDz and Americanlanguage dub.
Even more complex examples of transcultural exchange can be found in the
many American Marvel comics currently being adapted into anime by Japanese
producers. Marvel has a long history of transcultural television production in
Japan, going back at least as far as the Supaidāman/Spider-Man series that the
company licensed to Toei’s live action television production unit in Japan in
the 1970s (now available through the Marvel website at http://marvel.com/
videos/watch/563/japanese_spiderman_episode_01). More recently, Simon
Phillips, from Marvel International, announced that the Japanese anime
company Madhouse would be ‘reimagining the back stories and redesigning
the look of Marvel’s stable of characters to reflect Japanese culture. “It will
create an entire parallel universe for Marvel”’ (Gustines 2008). In this way,
the American Marvel superheroes, as in the 1970s television series, will be
localized in an attempt to make these originally American superheroes appeal
across cultural borders. Additional special projects like Heroman, written by
ex-Marvel head Stan Lee, for the Japanese Studio Bones, indicate further
trends towards creating new American comic book-style products for the
Japanese marketplace (‘News’ 2009). As these examples suggest, convergence
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in the anime industry is not a simple case of Americanization, but a wholeheartedly complex mix of transcultural exchanges, from stylistic exchanges to
at least partial exchanges in personnel and graphic art-based cultures. What
the preceding industrial considerations cannot show, however, is the extent to
which such exchanges in style as cultures result in new forms of anime.
TRANSCULTURAL TEXTS: POSITIVE OCCIDENTALISM WITHIN ANIME
Kotaro: ‘Does that mean you are a foreigner?’
No Name (Nanashi): ‘Who knows? … But nobody points me out now
that I’ve learned to dye my hair’.
In 2008, Studio Bones released their first feature film anime, Sword of the
Stranger, which was a jidaigeki, or period, samurai action film. During the
dialogue quoted above, the nameless hero dyes his hair from its natural red,
back to a more usual, Japanese, black. The scene questions what (national)
kind of masculinity is most effective, as No Name’s archetypal Japanese hero is
here effectively unmasked as a cultural ‘Other’. Villainy is also westernized in
Sword of the Stranger in Luo-Lang. Speaking both Chinese and either English
or Japanese, depending on which version of the film is watched, antagonist
Luo-Lang is a Caucasian swordsman seeking to find his equal in battle. His
hybridized cultural identity is again rich with potential meaning. For example,
it would be easy to read Luo-Lang as a transcultural villain whose lack of fixed
nationality or cultural identity implies a lack of trustworthiness. Essentially
an inversion of No Name, Luo-Lang has too many potential identities to
be heroic. As this example demonstrates, it is possible to find discourses on
(trans)national identity in anime themselves, discourses that suggest creative
practices aimed at making anime relevant within transcultural markets.
This, despite claims for anime as mukokuseki, or stateless (Napier 2005).
Koichi Iwabuchi reads the term somewhat differently: ‘mukokuseki is used in
Japan in two different, though not mutually exclusive ways: to suggest the
mixing of elements of multiple cultural origins, and to imply the erasure of
visible ethnic and cultural characteristics’ (2002: 71). While he states that
the second definition has been the one most commonly applied to anime,
it is telling that the term can also mean something very close to the idea of
the transcultural. Here, I want to rethink this conceptualization of anime
in relation to what Millie R. Creighton has discussed as Japanese culture’s
positive take on occidentalism (1995). Unlike more negative discussions that
incorporate jihad and the politics of aggressive political resistance to perceived
westernization (Buruma and Margalit 2004), positive occidentalism enables
ambivalent, ambiguous representations of cultural others that inherently and
creatively mix ‘elements of multiple cultural origins’ within anime. This section
examines examples of anime that represent England in order to analyse how
positive occidentalism manifests within anime as part of the creative practices
of Japanese animators. The examples analysed were chosen to contrast
with existing work on the relationship between Japan and America, already
discussed elsewhere (Napier 2007), introducing a nation more frequently
associated with debates around orientalism and occidentalism: England.
There are, then, at several distinct representations of Englishness
frequently visible in anime. First, Englishness is often literally visible in anime
in representations of famous English brand name goods from fashion to food
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Transcultural creativity in anime
cultures, and in demonstrations of Japanese mastery over complex European
art cultures. Second, England is often narratively represented as a locus for
tourism (perhaps particularly London), with famous English sites deployed
as sites to be toured by anime characters. There are also nostalgic representations wherein anime highlight locations now lost or unused in contemporary
England, either because buildings no longer exist or because they have been
turned into tourist attractions. Finally, there are class representations used as
storytelling devices, most commonly with characters falling in love despite
class divides. Given the focus of this article, the examples below will expand
on just the two most central of these areas: the representations of English
branded goods and the touristic visions of England offered in anime.
Emma: A Victorian Romance (Eikoku Koi Monogatari Emma, 2005 and 2007,
hereafter Emma) is fairly unusual for an English-set anime in that it is a rather
straight romantic fiction. It has been selected here because it offers an intriguing set of practical and creative choices that, it will be argued, made it a transcultural text from its inception in Japan. Sharon Kinsella (1995), in ‘Cuties in
Japan’, outlines how many of the maid-style Victorian-inspired fashion trends
in Japan grew out of interest in more general infantilization of women’s fashion, known as kawaii or cute culture. It is from this milieu of Victoriana and
romance-inspired fads and trends (Mulhern 1989), and fantasy anime that
focus on women’s domestic work [notably seen in Hayao Miyazaki’s films,
perhaps most obviously Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)], that the manga for
Emma (Kaori Mori, 2002–2006, 2006–2008) emerged in 2002. Adapted into an
animated television series in 2005, the series has become popular enough to
merit international distribution to America, though not yet, officially, to the
United Kingdom.
Kaori Mori, the series creator and manga artist, has been quoted as
saying, ‘I was drawn to the Victorian English designs’ (Nozomi Entertainment
2008: 44) of English architecture and interior design. Playing into the first
category of branded Englishness, this borrowed iconography lifts details
from English history and re-imagines them in this anime as part of an overtly
consumerist discursive repertoire. For example, in Emma differences in households are represented through numbers of servants and the types of beverages
served to visitors. Moreover, shopping, as pastime for the rich, and job for
servants, is frequently depicted in Emma, which includes lingering sequences
in antiques stores, department stores, markets and other sites of consumption. More explicit branding also occurs in other anime set in England. For
example, in Kuroshitsuji (The Black Butler, 2008–2010, not yet released in the
United Kingdom), there is often a ‘cake of the week’ and a tea, including teas
from high-status retailers like Fortnum and Mason. Consuming Englishness in
anime thereby becomes intermingled with contemporary Japanese consumption practices (often of prestige brands like Fortnum and Mason), class divisions and aspirations, and with Victorian manners, etiquette and fashion,
suggesting a consumerist imagination at work in these depictions of English
culture by Japanese creative industries personnel.
A branded imagination of place is also apparent in the use of famous tourist spaces within anime like Emma. The Crystal Palace offers a good example of this trend. Japanese cultural objects were included for the first time at
the ‘London Great Exhibition’ in 1851, announcing the breadth of Japanese
cultural achievements to the world well before Japan was forced to reopen
to international trade in 1868. Joy Hendry has shown how influential this
Great Exhibition was, writing that the exhibition was so popular that ‘it was
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displayed again in 1853 in the exhibitions of Dublin and New York’ (2000: 54).
The venue for that Exhibition, the Crystal Palace, appears in a variety of
anime, including the high-profile film Steamboy (Suchı̄mubōi, 2004) http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Installing_Japanese_character_sets by Katsuhiro
Otomo. The now lost site of the Crystal Palace plays a significant role in
Emma, appearing repeatedly across the two seasons, and providing the central
characters with a fantastical space in which they shed their class distinctions
(William is a rich and aspirational merchant’s son while Emma is a workingclass maid) and enjoy their romance publicly. The choice of the Crystal Palace
by Mori and the Japanese animators is therefore important because it provides
an easily nostalgized, romanticized and ‘othered’ space in which the central
romance can unfold. The Crystal Palace is, therefore, simultaneously familiar
and unfamiliar as an inaccessible, past world space.
Reading the Englishness of Emma as ‘Other’ to Japanese society is especially difficult given the confusion here between vision and sound displayed in
the text. Both within Japan and beyond, Emma has yet to receive an Englishvoice dub, remaining a linguistically Japanese text throughout its distribution thus far. In tying visual representations of Victorian England to Japanese
language, which still retains hierarchical status markers and differing levels
of politeness to a greater degree than contemporary English language, the
distinctions between the English ‘Other’ and Japanese ‘Self” are emphatically hybridized. Consequently, the fetishization and commodification of
Victorian Englishness that works to ‘other’ England in Emma is domesticated for Japanese audiences through its soundscape. However, the reverse
is true in its international circulation, where its subtitling and retention of
that aural landscape create a temporally and culturally distant version of the
local for UK audiences. This decision by Nozomi Entertainment is especially
interesting given that its parent company’s Right Stuf, has been producing
English-language dub tracks for DVD since 1997 (http://www.rightstuf.com/
rssite/main/animeResources/individual/?ForumThreadName=FT0000001529).
It suggests either that the American recreators of Emma did not think that
an expensive English dub was viable, or perhaps more simply that Englishaccented voice actors were not available to the company.
Where these linguistic and pictorial juxtapositions create distance in the
transcultural markets for Emma at one extreme, contemporary horror texts
demonstrate more wholehearted adoptions of a transcultural set of creative
Anglo and European aesthetics at another. While quite dissimilar on many
levels to a text like Emma, Japan’s vampire anime do have in common with it a
shared European set of source materials and a rich European generic iconography. The transculturalization and hybridization of Japanese horror is especially easy to discern in one prominent set of characters, namely, vampires.
Japanese renderings of vampire mythology offer hybridized, if not fully transcultural, figures. For example, Christopher Bolton argues that vampires are a
relatively new addition to Japanese culture, featuring first in Japanese literature
in the 1930s. He argues that in Blood: The Last Vampire (Hiroyuki Kitakubo,
2000,) at least, we can read the vampire as a metaphor for cultural imperialism
and miscegenation of post-war Japanese culture (Bolton 2007). Interestingly,
however, the word used to describe the vampire in Blood, when it is not
chiropteran (meaning of the bat family), is a traditional word for demon, oni.
In the creative choice use of traditional names for these new monsters, we can
see a localizing of this potentially foreign set of villains, one that might make
them all the more transcultural.
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The ‘true’ vampire in Japanese vampire anime is perhaps an even more
culturally ambivalent figure than this suggests. Like Blood’s chiropterans, horror
anime frequently make use of doubled vampire ‘Others’, vampires that come
out of new generic collisions within anime texts. There is another common
generic collision between science fiction and horror in vampire anime. The
chiropterans offer an ambiguous example, but the ‘vampires’ of Trinity Blood
(2005) or Black Blood Brothers (2006) offer more straightforward examples. In
the former, vampire is the name given to an invading race of aliens, and in
Black Blood Brothers, villainous vampires are called Kowloon children, after
Kowloon Bay, where a war was fought between what we might think of as
traditional vampires and a new set of more ‘contagious’ vampire villains. In
all three of these examples, traditional vampires like Saya in Blood: The Last
Vampire and Jiro Mochizuki in Black Blood Brothers become heroic figures who
hunt and kill other vampires. The links between age, tradition and European
cultures embodied within the vampire-hunting vampire hero in these anime
suggests a different sort of positive occidentalism at work, wherein literary
vampiric figures are juxtaposed heroically against newer, Japanese-invented
or innovated monsters. This shift in genres and the monstrous nature of
Japanese anime’s vampires works to produce a set of deeply ambiguous
characters, whose creation is a product of transcultural industrial and textual
exchanges.
A clear-cut example can be found in the utilization of the Dracula myth
in the Hellsing Original Video Animations (OVAs: 2001–2002 and 2006–) in
which a character called ‘Alucard’ (Dracula spelt backwards) works for the
company founded by his nemesis ‘Hellsing’. Here the famous Dracula character is recuperated as an anti-hero, but denied his easily recognized name
in both English and Japanese versions of the text, the latter of which further
localizes the character with the name ‘Arucādo’. Positive occidentalism in
anime can be seen, through examples like these, to resonate with audiences
within and outside Japan, appearing across genres, markets and character types in order to produce a strong sense of transcultural flow, of a feedback loop of sorts, working between European and Japanese media cultures.
This sense of transcultural flow beyond Japanese borders has been led by fan
demand as much as by industries attempting to create or corner global animation markets.
FAN CREATIVITY IN TRANSCULTURAL ANIME PROSUMPTION
Many of the examples cited above were first made available to fans through
fan distribution networks online. Like older, analogue grey markets for anime
distribution, new digital technologies are enabling greater levels of access to
Japanese culture outside Japan, at least in countries with relatively high-speed
Internet connections and sufficient computer technologies. While fans of anime
texts have long translated and subtitled the Japanese texts that they could not
otherwise access (Leonard 2005), the relationship between this group and the
industries producing anime is now shifting. The phenomenon of ‘digisubbing’,
the production of fan-subtitled anime via digital reproduction technologies,
is also changing the relationship between fans and anime texts considerably. While on the one hand enabling greater fan creativity in the reproduction of anime texts, it is also enabling a vast increase in the illegitimate flow
of anime outside Japan. One of the major changes relates to re-production,
that is to say, to the now decentralized nature of anime fansubbing (Pouwelse
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Rayna Denison
et al. 2008). Digisubbing allows the process of subtitling to be divided up into
separate tasks that can be undertaken in geographically dispersed locations
(Peréz-González 2007). While many fan subtitling groups do meet face-toface, Internet Relay Chat groups online, messaging and website forums now
mean that they do not have to do so to work together effectively. The effect is
that fansubbing groups follow a flexible and diversified production and distribution model, and that the finished product of one group can be taken up by
other groups and re-engineered into ever new languages, spreading across
geo-linguistic borders. However, in practice, due to the technological requirements (high-speed broadband Internet connections, potentially some server
space depending on dissemination technology and personal computers with
significant memory capacity), and pre-existing geographical concentration of
anime fandom, there is an apparent bias towards groups being based in the
United States (Hatcher 2005), which may help to explain why a high proportion of the groups subtitling do so originally in English.
In addition to being decentralized, anime fansubbing has also become
cheap and creative. Groups can buy or download relatively inexpensive technologies to help them re-produce their fansubbed versions of anime, like
the open source (free) Aegisub program that most use to append subtitles to
audio-visual anime files (http://www.aegisub.net/). The cheap technologies,
and speedy availability of raw footage from Japan, coincide to help fansubbers
produce ‘speedsubs’, fansubtitled versions of anime produced under racelike conditions as groups battle to produce the best, fastest subs (Berstchy
2008; http://www.dattebayo.com/). Moreover, the use of digital technologies enables greater creative impact by fan groups, who can use outlandish fonts and ‘karaoke’-style texts that bounce across the screen, and can
even create group logos that can be placed in close proximity to those of the
original Japanese creators. The heightened emphasis on speed ensures that
fansubbed versions of new Japanese titles are available long before the industry has typically been able to negotiate for the right to re-dub them, and the
greater creative freedom also ensures that the works of particular groups can
be easily recognized by their fans. It has been the speed of fansubs, therefore, along with the large numbers of shows available online, and the ease of
their distribution, that has placed the fansub community in conflict with the
industry. More than in the past, too, fansub groups are bringing individuality to their productions that promotes their own work sometimes as much as
that of the original creators.
For example, Soul Eater (2008–2009), chosen here because it follows a
pattern largely typical for recent anime series and was the most high profile
release from Japan at the 2008 ‘Tokyo International Anime Fair’, offers
good examples of the visible invisibility of fansub groups and their creative practices. In relation to its viewership, Soul Eater was being discussed
by fans on the Anime News Network website (a central industry and fan
source online) within six hours of its initial broadcast in Japan. These were,
however, fans who had viewed the raw (Japanese language) version of the
episode, and not a fansubbed one. A fansubbed version was announced on
the forum two days later, though fans questioned its quality (http://www.
animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=54204&postdays=0&
postorder=asc&start=0). However, over 50 groups eventually subtitled Soul
Eater in a wide range of languages (see: http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.
pl?show=anime&aid=5610). One of the most visible groups subtitling Soul
Eater was Rumbel Subs. Despite the grey, (il)legal nature of their creative
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work, Rumbel Subs have their own public website (http://www.rumbelsubs.com/), which includes a discussion forum and information about their
releases.
Rumbel is particularly interesting in terms of fansubtitling practices
because they are more subtle than some of their competitors (for more on
fansub practices, see Lee 2010, in this issue; Peréz-González 2007). They limit
their visibility within the text by not writing their name over title sequences,
as many groups do, instead placing a small brand logo in the top right corner
of the screen at the end of opening credits. While this can be read as limiting
their disruption of the text, their presence as fansubtitlers is signalled in other
ways, and the relatively covert nature of their practice could just as easily be
read as a shift towards the standardization of, and even professionalization
of, anime fansubbing practices. Moreover, their use of fonts is certainly more
adventurous than the off-white normally used as an industry standard (their
work includes non-standard fonts, text that scrolls across the screen to create
karaoke versions of opening and closing songs, in addition to non-standard
colours such as red subtitles). Their presence within the anime is thus
signalled through their use of what might be termed an ‘amateur standard’
followed by fan subtitlers. Luis Peréz-González (2007) has cited the use of
outlandish fonts, placement of subtitles in unexpected positions on-screen
and the translation of Japanese on-screen texts as the normal ways in which
fansubtitling practices can be differentiated from those of the industry. The
increasing standardization of anime fansubtitlers’ practices is just one way
in which the anime fansubtitlers are challenging industrial norms of creative
practice, introducing new aesthetics and transcultural audiences for anime.
Improvements in home computing are similarly changing fan collecting
habits (for more information on this, see Lee 2011, in this issue). They enable
fans to have sometimes terabytes-worth of media product housed in their
personal computers, and BitTorrent enables collecting without insisting upon
fan-community engagement beyond collecting. BitTorrent’s impact on the
anime fan community is therefore twofold, doing away with the necessity for
strong community ties between fans and fan producers, while simultaneously
making anime fansubs more available for collecting. As the main distribution
model for the industries in Japan and America remains DVD based, this new
online collecting behaviour is placing the industry increasingly at odds with
the fan community it serves. This is not to suggest that fans are only interested
in viewing fansubbed anime, and many do not engage with fansubs at all, but
the anime industry in America is now clear about the negative impact that
these online fansubs are having (Koulikov 2008). Convergence thus demonstrably takes place along divergent interstices and when these communities
come together, as in the case of media industries for anime and the participatory fandom(s) online, conflicts arise, often around claims to authenticity and
legitimacy (Jenkins 2004). In the case of anime fansubs and BitTorrent, active
fans may actually be creating a massified, less engaged set of viewers who do
not pay for their anime texts, and who can create large stockpiles of texts that
mean they never will.
CONCLUSIONS
From industrial production to fan re-production, the anime text is a mutable,
shifting entity that requires a flexible set of tools for investigation. Creative
practices do not align – fans produce works that are very different to those
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Rayna Denison
of the industry, and even industrial practices of remediation are not uniform,
with some anime titles receiving re-voicing while others are simply subtitled. The result is that the transcultural audiences for anime do not consume
these texts in any sort of standardized way. Moreover, the creative practices
of Japanese producers in working with companies from outside Japan, and,
it seems, increasingly featuring characters and settings that work to create
transcultural anime, means that these texts are becoming ever more familiar to even the global locations most remote from Japan. In these ways then,
the cultural practices of industry and fans need to be viewed as a constantly
changing and interacting set of creative processes, which can, but do not
always, inform one another. While the result may be an increasingly transcultural type of anime product and fandom, this may not have been the initial
aim; indeed, the more anime texts engage with representing the wider world,
the more the Japaneseness of these texts, as with Emma: A Victorian Romance,
may be thrown into relief. Moreover, as fans enter into more creative reproduction practices, the sense of where anime is ‘made’ is becoming more and
more difficult to pinpoint with any accuracy. It may be then that transcultural
linguistic markets provide a better means by which to understand anime’s
global presence than is the case with traditional regions and national markets.
It may be at the level of reproduction, rather than initial inception, that anime
is becoming most globalized.
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Denison, R. (2010), ‘Transcultural creativity in anime: Hybrid identities in the
production, distribution, texts and fandom of Japanese anime’, Creative
Industries Journal 3: 3, pp. 221–235, doi: 10.1386/cij.3.3.221_1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Rayna Denison lectures and researches in the area of Asian Film and Television
at the University of East Anglia. She has published a range of articles on anime
culture, including articles in the Animation Journal. She is currently writing
Anime: A Critical Introduction for Berg.
Contact: Room 1.46, c/o Room 2.40, Arts 2 Building, School of Film and
Television Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk NR4 7TJ, UK.
E-mail: r.denison@uea.ac.uk
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15
The Political Economy
of the Recorded Music
Industry
Redefinitions and New
Trajectories in the Digital Age
Andre Sirois and Janet Wasko
The fact of the matter is that popular music is one of the industries of the country.
It’s all completely tied up with capitalism. It’s stupid to separate it.
Paul Simon
Introduction
Media and communication scholars often overlook the study of recorded music,
so it may not be surprising that those who study the political economy of communications may neglect it as well. Yet recorded music is a significant component
of the culture industry, providing entertainment and leisure activities for audiences
and contributing to other media and cultural production. We need to understand
how this cultural form has developed as a commodity and an industry. This chapter suggests a political economic approach to studying the recorded music industry
that emphasizes history and technology. A review of various approaches to studying recorded music is presented, followed by an overview of the history of the
recorded music industry. The current industry is briefly outlined, with possible
future business models considered.
Of course, music has not always been a commodity. Before musical labor WaS
incorporated into a tangible thing – what Attali has called an “immaterial pleasure
turned commodity” (1985, 2) – it was consumed as representation without a
The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications, First Edition.
Edited byJanet Wasko, Graham Murdock, and Helena Sousa.
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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Political Economy of Recorded Music Industry
distinct form. Marx (1863) thought that musical performance was an instance
where labor did not result in a tangible commodity for sale, observing that: “the
service a singer performs for me satisfies my aesthetic needs, but what I enjoy
exists only in an action inseparable from the singer himself, and once his work,
singing, has come to an end, my enjoyment is also at an end; I enjoy the activity
itself – its reverberation in my ear.”
With the introduction of recording technologies, however, music did become
commodified and the recorded music industry grew to become a formidable component of the cultural industries. This history will be summarized later in this
chapter. But it is important here to emphasize that a political economy of culture
framework is appropriate for understanding this cultural form. According to
Golding and Murdock (2000, 70), this form of analysis “sets out to show how different ways of fmancing and organizing cultural production have traceable consequences for the range of discourse and representations in the public domain and
for audiences’ access to them.” As Hesmondhalgh (2007, 12) notes, the “music
industries” are one of the core cultural industries that “deal primarily with the
industrial production and circulation of texts.” And while many studies of cultural
industries have focused on commodified texts, it is important to remember that
recorded music is both text and commodity. The focus here is on the commodity
that is produced by the recorded music industry, not necessarily the text or the
musical content itself.
The study of the political economy of recorded music draws on the theoretical
foundations of political economy and its application to media and culture. The
study of political economy is about how societies are organized and controlled,
and thus involves the analysis of power. The study of political economy of the
media is about the production, distribution, and consumption ofmedia. Importantly,
the approach is interested in how the media are organized and controlled within
the larger political economy. In other words, it is concerned with who has power to
make decisions about the media, and who benefits from these decisions. It is about
understanding how power relations actually work within and around the media.
More specifically, the study of political economy of the media entails the historical
analysis of media commodities, industries, and institutions, including but not limited to corporations. The roles of labor and the state are fundamental components
of political economic analysis, as well as issues relating to globalization.
Thus the study of the political economy of recorded music is concerned with
the production, distribution, consumption, and reproduction of various forms of
recorded music. While the “music industry” is composed of many related industries, the focus here is on recorded forms of music, which means a special interest
in recording and distribution technologies. We suggest that the political economy
of recorded music should be understood through its historical development as a
commodity and the evolution of an industry through all its stages of production
to consumption to reproduction. We also stress the technologies involved in the
recorded music industry, arguing that recorded music has been more about
technology and less about art/ music from its inception. In other words, historically, technology has made music into a commodity.
The Study of the Recorded Music Industry
“Music is spiritual. The music business is not”
Van Morrison
When analyzing the industry that produces music as a commodity, few studies
have explicitly linked critical political economy with recorded music. The brief
review of literature that follows will hopefully provide a framework for how the
recording industry has been studied, focusing especially on the ways that political
economic analyses have been applied.
Many scholars agree that there is a dearth of serious writing about this industry
(e.g., Gronow 1983, Chanan 1995) and that academic research in general has “shown
little systematic interest in popular music” (Burnett 1996, 3). McQuail (2005, 36)
notes that “little attention has been given to rriusic as a mass medium in theory and
research.” Malm and Wallis (1992, 15) also point out that until the late 1970s
“remarkably few studies of the socia-economic aspects of the industrial processing
of music” have come from communication scholars. Nevertheless, there still is a
body of work that examines music and the recorded music industry, and may
contribute to an understanding of the political economy of recorded music.
Classic studies of music
In his historical treatment of western classical music, Attali traces music’s transfor-
mation from a social experience as representation to its repetitive function as commodity. For Attali, music “became an industry, and its consumption ceased to be collective”
(1985,88, original italics) as people began the individualized act of stockpiling music
commodities. The historical development of recording, which was a means of social
control, pushed music into background noise as “a factor in centralization, cultural
normalization, and the disappearance of distinctive cultures” (1985, 111).
Weber (1958) suggested that western music itself was the product of capitalist
institutions, highlighting how seemingly “irrational” cultural production could
become rationalized. However, Frith (1988, 12) later warned that industrialization
doesn’t happen to music – a problematic argument “which fuses (and confuses)
capital, technical, and musical arguments” – but instead, recorded music is the
fmal product of that process.
Benjamin (1969 /1936) considered the potential emancipatory effects of mechanical
production on artworks, arguing that this historicai development democratized
access to, and critical thinking toward, cultural objects and destroyed the social
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Political Economy of Recorded Music Industry
control Caura” and “authenticity”) of works of art that existed in a specific time and
place. On the other hand, Horkheimer and Adorno (2001/1947,95) argued that a
monolithic”culture industry” logic existed which then transmuted art into”a species
of commodity,” while earlier work by Adorno (1990/1941) tackled the standardized
production/ consumption of popillar music. Adorno wasn’t concerned with industry structure, but how popillar music applied an ideolOgical “mechanical schemata”
to its production, which promoted an audience who passively listened with rhythmic
obedience as the commoditized and reified music maximized economic dividends.
as a symbol of intellectualism. While George’s (1988) polemic explores how the
white music industry transformed black culture into an exploitable commodity,
Kelley (2005), in his poignant edited volume, explores how white-owned entertainment conglomerates have profited from a “structure of stealing” from the
black community. Another important contribution includes Kofsky’s (1998) political economic analysis of how jazz musicians work and are explOited under
capitalism.
Sociological studies of music
Critical theory and Marxist approaches
In an argument reminiscent of Benjamin, Theberge (1997, 185) contends that,
with the advent of the mechanical production/reproduction of sound, a “new
relationship between technology, musical practice, and the capitalist organization
of production began to evolve.” Breen (1995,501) points out that the record business is just another element of corporate structure, and therefore, “Institutional
economics is a valuable tool in deSCribing the historical development of popillar
music within corporate society.”
Chapple and Garofalo (1977) apply an economic analysis to rock and roll,
highlighting how capitalist corporations who control the means of production
determine the actual music (as commodity and content) that consumers get.
However, Garofalo (1986, 83), in some ways, rejects his initial assertion with Chapple,
arguing that “there is no point-to-point correlation between controlling the marketplace economically and controlling the form, content, and meaning of music.”
More recent Marxist works on recorded music include Callahan (2005, 58), who
believes the industry feeds consumers corporately controlled and homogenous
“anti-music” produced by “the labor of the musician.” In a business concerned
only with “money derived from the exploitation of musicians and copyright” (228),
the industry ‘1ords it” over musicians: “Within the capitalist market system, the
productivity of [the musician’s] labor is not in the artistic creation, per se, but in
the profit it generates for the record company or publisher through mass production, promotion and sales” (199). Eisenberg makes a Marxist argument that the
music commodity transforms both the musician and consumer into a fetishist:
“The musician need never see the working man behind the money; the listener
need never see the working musician behind the vinyl” (2005, 20).
Studies of music genres
Other political economic analyses of specific genres within the recording industry
include Hobart’s essay, “The Political Economy of Bop” (1981), which examines
the contradictions of musical idiom between bop’s origins in the black ghettos and
There has also been a considerable amount of SOciological research on the industry with foci on the production, content, and reception of recorded music. For
example, Frith (1981) makes an argument (sirnilClI to Benjamin) that corporations
don’t necessarily co-opt popillar cillture as they tend to follow; rather than lead, in
trends; therefore, the record industry has developed strategies for market control
simply because they do not control the market. According to Dowd (2003) these
genre-based markets are in fact manufactured by the industry itself to maintain as
much control as possible (of the music and its consuinption).
Keith Negus (1992, 1996, 1999) has made similar arguments about corporate
control within the industry and of its market. Negus suggests that there is a corporate “machine” but also that we shoilld consider the “human beings who
inhabit the machine” (1996, 36) – those who make creative decisions and not just
fmancial ones throughout the entire corporate structure. This idea is elaborated
upon when Negus looks at the sometimes awkward interplay between economics and cillture in the record business – a concept where “an industry produces culture and culture produces an industry” (1999,14, italics in original). Swiss et al. (1998)
refer to Negus’s concept as a “production-text-consumption” model where the
industry affects musicians, marketing and genres, technology, and broadcasting,
as well as musical aesthetics and meaning. Similarly, music commodities have a
symbolic Significance and thus two parallel economies are operating in the
recorded music business: “the economy of use and the economy of exchange”
(Storey 1996, 98).
Other SOciologically grounded studies have looked at the tension between major
and independent companies, which Negus (1999) suggests is based on distribution
and not production. For instance, Hesmondhalgh (1998a) looks at the underground
British dance music industry as one that, while pursuing profit and sometimes
conforming to the capitalist system in order to reach a wider audience, may trilly
offer alternative messages/lifestyles. Other work by Hesmondhalgh (l998b, 1999)
uses specific case studies of independent companies and genres (mainly punk) to
demonstrate the tensions between the institutional politics of the recording industry and oppositional cultural forms. And, fmally, Lee (1995), using Wax Trax!
Records as a case study, examines “independent” as an industry concept.
Andre Sirois and Janet Wasko
Political Economy of Recorded Music Industry
Other sociological perspectives focus on the “empirical” relationship between
market concentration and diversity (Peterson and Berger 1971, 1975, Peterson
1976, Lopes 1992, Dowd 2004) and organizational structure (Scott 1999, Huygens
et al. 2001). These studies suggest that market concentration corresponds to homogeneity while competitive markets lead to diversity; however, Lopes (1992) contends that diversity and innovation depends more on the operations of companies
and market structure than merely levels of concentration.
American industrialized music has affected music produced outside of the US
(e.g., Robinson et al. 1991). Burnett (1996,6) looks at how the Internet is helping
the record business create a globalized cultural economy, suggesting that “the
music industry, like others, constantly tries to develop new ways to control both
supply and demand….” Looking at the interaction between music in the mass
media and the larger musical activities in society – specifically in the context of
the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe – Malm and Wallis claim that the record
industry has been at the forefront of the “global standardization of cultural
products” (1992, 7).
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Legal studies of the music industry
Many scholars argue that, in order to properly understand the recording industry
as a capitalist enterprise that exploits commodified labor, a political economic
analysis of this industry should emphasize copyright (e.g., Fabbri 1993, Cvetkovski
2007, Hesmondhalgh 2007). Fabbri believes that researchers must explore copyright because a “considerable part of the overall turnover of the music industry is
based on the exchange of immaterial items” (1993, 159).
Sanjek (1998) argues that music is no more than a “rights package” and thus we
should examine the recording industry on two interrelated levels: (1) the “corporate regime” of mergers and influence in production and consumption; and (2) the
‘1egal-legislative regime” of ownership deregulation and the increased scope and
duration of intellectual property rights. According to Cvetkovski (2007, 27),
“Copyright should be considered as the common thread that binds the entire
industry … without it, there is no music business.”
While Lessig (2005,2008) and Bollier (2005) argue that copyright’s scope and
duration have deviated from its constitutional framing in favor of corporate
interests, other discussions by McLeod (2001,2005) and Vaidhyanathan (2001)
demonstrate how the music industry, as part of the “copyright cartel,” privatizes culture and chills creativity. Other interesting research has looked at how
the recording industry has relied on copyright law to curtail digital sampling,
as well as addressing the cultural and economic tensions surrounding this issue
(e.g., Demers 2006, Hesmondhalgh 2006, Toynbee 2006). Frith’s edited volume,
Music and Copyright (1993), contains studies from international perspectives
and serves as a strong point of departure from analyses of the American copyright system.
International studies of music
While many of the previously mentioned studies of the recording industry have
focused on the US market, there are sources that focus on other markets (e.g.,
Gronow 1983, Manuel 1993, Taylor 1997), as well as how the hegemony of
Studies of digital music
There is also a growing body of research examining the music business and its
challenges in the era of digital capitalism and technology (e.g., McCourt and
Burkart 2003, Katz 2004). Alexander (2002) offers a helpful exploration of the relationship between market structure and digital distribution, as well as how the
recording oligopoly’s dominance is fading along with its long-established distribution stronghold. In Burkart and McCourt’s (2006) historically grounded analysis,
the authors document how the Internet has untied the industry’S physical business
model in an age of the “celestial jukebox” where music commodities are instantly
available.
Although the current economic outlook for the recording industry may be precarious, some authors have suggested future models for market capitalization (e.g.,
Fox 2004, Kusek and Leonard 2005). Interestingly, while the record industry has
essentially criminalized its own market, Kusek and Leonhard (2005, x) suggest that
the industry may have to accept a model “where access to music becomes a kind
of ‘utility.’ Not for free, per se, but certainly for what feels like free.”
Popular sources for studying the music industry
While most of this literature is academic, more popular publications also provide
important sources for understandipg the recorded music industry. For instance,
both Dannen’s Hitmen (1990) and Elliot’s Rockonomics (1993) are excellent accounts
of the relationship between money and power within the industry during the
1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, since the music business itself is bound by legalityon both creative and financial ends – then who better to learn from than the entertainment lawyers who are involved in these processes? Therefore, “how-to” books
(e.g., Passman 1997, Lathrop 2003, Rudsenske and Denk 2005) provide interesting
insider accounts of how the recording industry operates, not only legally, but also
through its stages of production and distribution.
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Political Economy of Recorded Music Industry
The History of the Recorded Music Industry
tangible digital era (roughly 1983-2000). This historical account will ultimately
lead us to the present age of digital capitalism and its crowning format – the MP3.
We find that, as in otherfields, capitalism has created the most magnificent apparatusfor the production, distribution and consumption of music that the world has ever
seen: yet this apparatus is so riddled with contradictions basically economic in origin
that it negates its own potentialities and is rapidly becoming unable to fUnction.
Composer, Elie Siegmeister, Worker’s Music Association, 1938
By reviewing the technological history of the recorded music industry, we fmd,
much like Marx, that the present condition can be illuminated by examining the
past. While historically new recording technologies, companies, and artists have
come and gone, the prevalent logic of this industry and the music commodity
itself has remained – capital. The history also reveals an ongoing battle between
playback formats and the companies that produce them, the inevitable movement
toward consolidation and conglomeration, and the tensions between recording
companies and the consumers who have demanded cheap or free music.
Technology has been a major historical contradiction within the industry as it has
both helped to propel the music commodity to the far reaches of the globe, while
simultaneously seeking to destroy it from its material core.
In other words, while the development of recorded music has been”completely
carried out within the capitalist structure” (Chapple and Garofalo 1977,300), the
history of the recorded music industry is fundamentally about technology, as
recorded music is very much the product of science. Millard writes, “This is a story
primarily of change, for the industry built on the phonograph was driven by the
constant disruption of innovation … one invention after another arrived to upset
the fragile balance between the great companies and change the relationships of
the old power with the new” (2005, 5-6).
In one of the most detailed technological histories of recorded sound and
business, The Fabulous Phonograph, Gelatt (1977, 11) writes that a “history of the phonograph is at once the history of an invention, an industry, and a musical instrument.” Kenney (1999, 44) argues that a critical-cultural history of the phonograph
“demonstrates the important ways in which economic and cultural forces have
shaped technological inventions.” To analyze the record business through its history, Frith (1988, 13) suggests three specific issues: (1) the effects of technological
change; (2) the economics of popular music; and (3) a new musical culture as technology transforms musical experiences, thus leading to “the rise of new sorts of musical
consumption and use.” As these three scholars suggest, any historical analysis of the
recorded music industry should consider the relationship between technologies,
culture, and economics, as well as evolving modes of production and consumption.
Thus the history of the recorded music industry presented here is divided into
four eras marked by different methods of recording and playback: the acoustic era
(1877-1923), the electrical era (1924-1960s), the cassette era (1970-82), and the
The acoustic era
Shordy after Thomas Edison patented his phonograph in 1878, a device that used
a vertical method for cutting sound onto a cylinder, the “talking machine” business
was born and thus “music began to become a thing” (Eisenberg 2005, 13). At fIrst,
there was a proliferation of companies interested in recorded sound.
by
the turn of the twentieth century – a time marked by competition for hardware
development and sales – three dominant companies emerged in the us: Edison’s
National Phonograph Company, the Columbia Phonograph Company, and the
Victor Talking Machine Company. These “Big’]bree” companies dominated the
early industry because they were large enough to manufacture and market their
products on a large scale, support research laboratories, and control,almost every
important patent for talking machines and records (Chanan 1995, Morton 2000,
Coleman 2003, Millard 2005).
While Columbia was the fIrst to release prerecorded music, initially all cylinder
recordings were “original,” as no method for mass duplication existed until
Berliner’s lateral gramophone discs were released in 1894. This is when the recording process became separate from the reproduction stage (Day 2000) as eventually
discs would be reproduced using a gold master disc to stamp copies.
The disc was also important because, unlike Edison’s or Columbia’s devices that
allowed consumers to record sound on cylinders, the gramophone was playback
only, thus allowing for a one-way flow of musical content. While the earlier technologies were intended as dictation devices, Berliner’s disc recordings “would be
made solely by manufacturers, not by consumers” (Morton 2000, 32). The mass
production of discs ultimately lowered production costs and allowed for mass consumption; thus Berliner’s invention ultimately set the stage for the recorded music
industry as we now know it.
The introduction of the disc also initiated the perpetual format war in the
recording industry and the struggle for industry standardization. The disc forced
Edison and Columbia to adapt in order to compete in the market, bur because of
the lack of industry standardization the disc initially confused consumers (Steffen
2005, 33). According to Millard (2005, 213), “standardization of recorded sound
products is an invisible technology” – it can only be heard. Throughout the twentieth century, many sound delivery technologies would be released, but the successful ones were those that would achieve industry-wide standardization.
In 1897, 500,000 records were sold; two years later, that number increased to 2.8
million. Sometime between 1901 and 1903, Berliner sold his interests in the gramophone to Eldridge johnson, a skilled inventor and an exceptional businessman,
and the Victor Talking Machine Company was born.
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Political Economy of Recorded Music Industry
By 1902 Victor was valued at $2.7 million, and through reinvestment into
research and development, the company’s value increased to $12 million in 1905.
This jump in value may have been due to the 1903 patent pool between Victor and
Columbia. Because Victor developed the use of wax recordings and Columbia
implemented the disc format (both clearly infringed on each other’s patent rights),
this cross-licensing agreement virtually left Edison’s company and the cylinder in
the dust.
Johnson realized that the phonographs of the early 1900s were, like most developments ,of modernity, aesthetically industrial. Thus by 1906 the Victor gramophone had become the Victrola, the fIrst mass-market record player. This new
playback device acted as “Victorian camouflage for the industrial machine” (Kenney
1999,51) as it hid the mechanics within a wooden cabinet. By Johnson advertising
the device as “a standard musical instrument,” the Victrola fostered the industry
ideology that “phonographs should look as little like phonographs as possible”
(Gelatt 1977, 192). While early recordings were used to sell playback hardware by
displaying its technical virtues and the inventor’s genius, by 1907 the inventor had
been replaced by the opera star as the selling point of the record (Millard 2005, 61) the “moment at which one might pinpoint the remcation of music” (Eisenberg
2005, 13). Because of the highbrow tastes of the men owning the Big Three, the
music produced by their record companies reflected such values (Morton 2000, 29) signaling that even in the early days of the record business, those in control of material production also had an influence on the ideological production of the era.
Before the prominence of musical recordings, the act of producing and consuming music relied on the sale of composers’ sheet music by publishers, as well
as live performances of those compositions. In the same year that music “remed,”
American composer and conductorJohn Philip Sousa wrote his famed essay, “The
Menace of Mechanical Music” (1906), decrying the talking machine business and
its”canned music.” Sousa’s piece demonstrated the tensions between different levels of musical production as he criticized the phonograph for victimizing the
“moral rights” of composers’ musical works, as well as for encouraging a passive
relationship to the world of music by transferring the human quality of music to
a soulless machine.
By 1910 a mass market for recorded music was flourishing as Victor sold 94,557
machines (compared to 7,570 in 1901). Edison realized that grooved discs were the
way of the future, and in 1913 released Edison Diamond Discs – a blatant rip-off
of the Victrola – which faired poorly in the market. In 1914, the same year that
ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) formed to protect the publishing copyrights of Tin Pan Alley’s composers used in mechanical
recordings, the Big Three controlled a market in which18 recorded sound companies brought in a total of $27 million in profIts. While Victor’s value grew to $33
million in 1917, most of the basic patents for the phonograph and gramophone
expired that same year, thus opening the market in 1918, when 166 recorded sound
companies made $158 million in profit (a 500% profIt increase in just four years).
“The economics of record production during this period are easy to comprehend.
The low cost of entry into the business stimulated new labels, catering to relatively
small markets, thus a distinction appeared between independent companies and
the majors” (Chanan 1995, 54).
With a surge in postwar consumption, Edison’s company experienced its best”
year in 1920 with $22 million in profIts. However, this success would be short-lived
as the sales of radio sets in the US nearly doubled from 1921-2, which cut into the
record industry’s sales – a mere $106 million during that same period. Hit by falling
sales and overproduction, as well as the new radio technology that provided music
to consumers for free, the 1920s was a decade in which the recording industry felt
its fIrst real economic hardship.
The electrical era
The electrical era, represented by the shellac 78rpm disc and eventually transistor
technology, is characterized by technological innovation, as well as increased
industry concentration brought on by the Great Depression in the US. It is important to note that the dominant fIrms in the music business in the early twentieth
century were not vertically integrated and the industry as a whole was quite fragmented. Hobart (1981) observes that four distinct forms of capital existed in the
early twentieth century, each exerting its own pressures and priorities upon the
character of music, its production and reprodUCtion: publishing,
broadcasting, and sound recording. During this period, these discrete activities became
controlled within vertically integrated recording companies.
By 1924 Western Electric had patented its electric sound recording microphones;
before this recording development, sound was collected acoustically by a horn and
piped to a diaphragm which vibrated the cutting stylus. This “acoustic process of
recording therefore limited what music could be attempted, it affected how the
musicians performed in various ways, and it seriously distorted the sounds they
actually made” (Day 2000,11). The new electric recording process (then known as
Orthophonic recording) was able to capture the musical energy lost through the
inefficient acoustic process.
In 1925 Victor was still trying to sellits stockof acoustic machines, but announced
that November 2, 1925, would be “Victor Day” – the day they would release the
fIrst consumer phonograph, the Orthophonic Victrola, that would play electrically
recorded discs. A week after “Victor Day,” there was more than $20 million in
orders for Orthophonic Victrolas.
Throughout the late 1920s, profIts for the industry remained steady at around
$70 million yearly, but radio was cutting into the business and the record industry
had to compete with broadcasting or join it. Finding a market for the sale of
records when consumers could get the music free from radio proved to be a challenge. Victor had reached an agreement with RCA to incorporate Radiolas into
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Politioal Eoonomy of Re(Jorded Musio Industry
Victrolas by 1925, and, a year later, with many profitable years behind him,
Johnson sold his company for over $28 million to two New York banking houses.
Johnson’s Victor Talking Machine Company had also successfully “reinforced the
upper and middle levels of an American musical hierarchy in recorded music”
(Kenney 1999, 64). In 1927 Columbia invested in United Independent Broadcasters
to get airtime to promote its records, which signaled a convergence between
industries and technologies. By 1929, RCA had completed its buyout of Victor to
create the RCA-Victor subsidiary, had taken over Victor’s Camden, New Jersey,
factory, and stopped manufacturing talking machines in order to start mass producing radios. RCA not only eliminated a major competitor from outside the
burgeoning radio industry by absorbing all of Victor’s assets, but gained “an
extensive plant and a well-organized system of distributors and dealers” for its
radios (Gelatt 1977, 247).
Although the Depression affected the radio industry, it “decimated the record
business” (Kenney 1999, 158) as record sales dropped from $75 million in 1929 to
$16.9 million two years later. The early 1930s, then, marked the most “doleful
phase” for the recording industry as both the sales of discs and phonographs plummeted (Gelatt 1977, 255). During the decade, new strategies developed between
the radio and recording industries as the various mergers and acquisitions reflected
a shift in power from record companies to large entertainment corporations. “They
were now empires of sound,” writes Millard, ”huge, integrated business organizations based on the reproduction and transmission of sound” (2005, 175). In this
phase of recoq:led music’s history, the importance of the inventor was eclipsed by
the business-oriented CEOs of these new sonic empires.
By 1931, UK Columbia merged with the Gramophone Company to create
Electrical and Musical Instruments (EMI) – a deal that gave EMI licensing rights to
the popular HMV record label in Europe – thus making it the largest record company in the world. After purchasing American Columbia in 1932 and selling six
million units, the American Record Company (ARC) was the largest record company in the US and was the leader in the inexpensive record market. In 1936, two
years after the incorporation of American Decca (another producer of cheap
records) by Jack Kapp, more than 50 percent of the records being produced were
destined for jukeboxes across America. Indeed, the 13 million discs used yearly by
jukeboxes actually saved the music industry. American Decca was not only the fIrst
record company to create economies of scale through aggressive marketing
schemes and jukebox sales, but they also introduced the star system within the
recording industry (Sanjek and Sanjek 1991).
By the end of the 1930s, recorded music was no longer a distinct business, but
was part of the integrated entertainment industry as a new Big Three had emerged:
RCA-Victor, Decca, and Columbia. At this point, radio was king, and, in an effort
to promote regional music (“hillbilly” and “race” records) while serving the local
stations that ASCAP had largely ignored, radio broadcasters formed a rival performance rights organization in 1939, Broadcast Music, Incorporated (BMI).
While only 100 million discs sold in the US prior to entering World War II, military research and the US forces’ capture of Radio Luxembourg’s magnetic taping
technology on September 11, 1944, as well as postwar consumerism, fueled the
sale of 350 million records in 1946. However, as industry sales rose to $89 million
and recording companies began shilling their focus toward instant successes in the
form of the pop record, the lion’s share went to Columbia, Decca, RCA-Victor,
and Capitol (85% or 300 million records).
In 1948 the music industry met another foe, television. But instead of succumbing to the new technology, as it had done with radio, the music industry fought
back with a weapon of its own: the long-playing microgroove record (LP).
Invented by Dr Peter Goldmark at CBS, the LP extended recording time to a half
hour, and in its first year on the market the format topped $3 million in sales.
RCA-Victor would not be outdone, so in 1949, after a $5 million marketing campaign, they debuted the 7inch 45rpm single dis.c – a four-minute format that was
perfect for the pop single. Because CBS didn’t want to delay the release of the LP
until it had a player, and perhaps learning from the past failures of delivery technologies that were introduced into the marketplace without industry-wide
standardization, they developed an adapter that would play LPs on existing
phonographs.
By the early 1950s, however, RCA-Victor began producing LPs and CBS 45s,
once again proving that industry standardization between hardware and software
was key to financial success. It is interesting to note that the industry move to the
LP also encouraged record manufacturers to buy new pressing machines. In turn,
the old machines were bought by people who used them to make bootleg copies
of records produced by the industry. In 1952, the RIAA (Recording Industry
Association of America) formed to set a technical standard for recording and playback on vinyl records and to lobby in Washington on behalf of its members in
the recording industry, but also partly in response to the new rash of LP piracy
(Morton 2000).
Moving into the 1950s, the recording industry again experienced a flurry of
independents (similar to the indie proliferation in 1918). With magnetic tape dramatically lowering recording costs, and LPs and 45s being relatively cheap to press,
the barrier to entering the market decreased rapidly. However, the major players
solidifIed their dominance through full vertical integration. The major companies
“owned their own manufacturing plants and directly controlled their distribution
outlets in addition to simply producing records” (Chapple and Garofalo 1977, 15)
and were designated as “majors” because they did their own nationwide distribution (Dannen 1990, 112). Previously, market control had come from technological
innovation and musical production, but, by the end of the 1950s, market domination was firmly in control of those fIrms with distributio…