THE SALE OF POP MUSIC under NEO-LIBERALISM
By Rhini Townend
The neo-liberalisation of capitalism has a chokehold on modern pop culture. What began as art and expression of freedom has become a brand that we all buy into everyday without even realising, and what’s worse is that the brand is carefully curated by bourgeoise companies severed from the music industry itself. If that sounds like a lot of words you don’t fully understand, don’t worry, by the time you finish reading this article I hope you’ll be completely clued up on the economic state of popular music and thinking “yeah fuck neo-liberal capitalism and fuck corporations for commodifying the art of music”.
Photo: Unsplash
First things first, what exactly is capitalism? It’s more than just a fancy word young people throw around as a critique of the current state of our government. It’s an economic state of governing that in essence is not as nefarious as it sounds – it’s a system of exchanging goods and services under a contracted authority for an effective economy. Basically, businesses own capital goods, and the government own the businesses, and they set the precedent for how these goods can be exchanged. When people say, “ugh capitalism makes me sick”, they are most likely referring to paying a lot of money for something that doesn’t equate quality and function to its commercial value. Goods are sold to us at such a high price because in order to participate in social standings, we have to express ourselves through the acquisition of goods, and the more we acquire these goods, the more we drive the price up. Capitalism relies on the cycle of supply and demand. It’s not necessarily a veiled gaslighting attempt by the powers that be to get us to fill their pockets – it’s supposed to be beneficial for all social groups under the capitalist society. However, this all changed with the progression to neo-liberalism.
Now, we’re not just consumers, but we don’t even benefit from what we’re consuming. The capitalist exchange of goods becomes competitive, and policies become market-oriented, including the move to privatisation. The governing authority are moved to a tyrannical position of economic domination, as all the capital falls into their hands. They no longer defend the whole society’s interests in pursuit of economic development but are a financial oligarchy. Their economy grows, whilst the inequality gap widens – based on the supply and demand cycle, they drive up production and therefore labour, but the wages of the labourers do not increase. There is overproduction, overconsumption, and a greater profit for the few, while the many misses out on this increase.
“But music isn’t a good! It’s art!” – In this economy?! Not likely. The free-market competition means that essentially, everything is a brand and is marketed as such to appeal to an audience to buy, buy, buy. Capital isn’t just in financial form but cultural too, so how can a cultural industry thrive without harnessing products to be consumed more? Music isn’t just a genre but a commodity, meaning listeners as an audience become customers, buyers, consumers. This primarily affects what we know as pop music – pop, of course, standing for popular. What do we truly believe makes such mainstream music popular? It can’t really be unified as a genre as pop music covers all musical roots. Despacito draws inspiration from Latin urban hip-hop and reggaeton which stayed in the charts in 2017 for 11 weeks, returning to the Number 1 spot on three different occasions. Ed Sheeran also topped the UK charts in 2021 for 11 weeks with Bad Habits with a Frankenstein of dance and electronic and synth-pop. Harry Styles has so far in 2022 topped the charts with the 80s wet dream synth-pop As It Was for 10 weeks and I’m absolutely sick of hearing it. It is hard to draw any kind of similarity between the musicality of these three songs. The connection is, you guessed it, capitalism.
The link that makes these all ‘pop’ is the star quality and the playability and the belligerent capitalist marketing of these songs. Firstly, because English speakers’ caveman brains switch off at anything not English, Despacito was rereleased with Luis Fonsi singing in English, and secondly, they added vocals of the one and only Justin Bieber that everyone definitely asked for. Ed Sheeran is the perfect epitome of a musician overpowered by the claws of capitalism to become A Brand™. He was a weasley character busking on the streets who iconified acoustic hipsters singing about sad things that all depressed teenage girls believed they related to; A Team is about drugs and prostitution and death. Put that alongside some sad guitar chords and we all said, “Oh my god, I do that”. Then skip forward ten years, he’s still singing about drugs, but the wailing guitar is replaced with aggressively engineered synth like some kind of pop monster. If you heard his new song and thought “who let the man cosplaying as a homeless person do this?”, well the answer is his marketing team. Keep the same old miserable themes so the passive listener doesn’t have to pay any mind to the lyrics, but play those same few chords on a synth instead to really move with the times.
Moving to my last example, Harry Styles flawlessly encapsulates ‘The Next Big Thing’ and I honestly don’t think he’ll lose his acclaimed status for quite some time. As It Was, to put it bluntly, is boring in my opinion. However, the hype around its release was so insane that it didn’t matter what music he put out into the world as his fans would have lapped it up regardless. It might be the most zeitgeist single I’ve heard in a while, with warped synth mirroring the resurgence of an abominable modern A-Ha. It sounds like a monkey was trying to learn Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on keyboard and then someone looped it, sped it up, and layered it with incoherent mumbling. What I mean to say is there is little to no musical originality or creativity. (Could this be said for the majority of pop music? Allow me to point you to video documenting the use of the same chord progression in about 50 pop songs:
So, why? Why these three white men? Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles. Not very unique, not necessarily musical prodigies, no different to the looks and talent of any white man found in the queue for a singing competition. The first could probably be explained by his child-star rise to fame, which for some twisted reason people adore. The second is without a doubt the free-thinking liberal drug-addict-but-also-not-really-a-drug-addict-because-he-went-to-private-school look that was monetised and cheapened. For the record, Ed Sheeran was never homeless – he managed to move to London on his own and simply chose to couch-surf because it was a “very fun time”. He is a raging rich boy who has profited from the hip poverty aesthetic. The third is because people love a comeback story and a rebranding. Going from one fifth of a teen idol boy band on X-Factor to a glamorous, flamboyant, Bowie-esque alternative rock icon screams starlike resurrection. Especially when you compare his image to that of the other One Direction band members – Niall Horan cites Kasabian, Arctic Monkeys and Oasis as inspiration for his solo endeavours. Did you even know that he released music as a solo act? Exactly. These are the three narratives that have been sold to you. Pop music is a market, where already rich industries get richer, and musical artists are ‘the next big thing’.
These three artists possess some exploitative quality that made their music an easy sell. In many ways music production is second to its marketing. The process of production is less in the hands of the writers, engineers, and producers, but the people higher up who keep them in the job. Workers lower down in the music industry are appendages to a commodity, with their labour less meaningful in terms of qualitative content and skills; their work is a routine they do not control. This is especially a problem for other musicians yet to make their name in the popular music industry. The quality of neo-liberalism that widens the inequality gap means it is harder for burgeoning artists to ‘make it’, financially and culturally. They need to have relevance in the moment. The standardisation of music means it has become conducive to regressive listening; the central role music plays in everyday life means it must be simple. As consumers we are positioned to switch off and just consume. Mainstream music has adopted repetition and formula to produce predictability, which insults the evolution of our free-will. Pop music targets an audience of passive listeners who seek security and a cosy feeling in music they already know, from the fetishised stars that are hero-worshipped by the media as celebrities so that we take them seriously as salesmen of trusted goods.
The need for artists to be effective salesmen largely stems from the digitisation of music. In modern music consumption, the recording and distribution is primarily technological. It’s a new model of labour, of which streaming and social media have become a crucial tool. Consumers used to buy CDs or cassettes, with these sales forming the principal exchanges of goods and indicating what was popular. The 21st century is an increasingly digitalised brave new world, with the ecology of consumption revolving around who is trending online. So, what do capitalist firms do with this sociocultural change? They shift their strategies from the music industry to the IT industry. This is how music has become privatised, with Spotify and iTunes and TikTok premised on a commercial model of income from rights ownership, paying artists mere pennies for their streamed music.
Constant streaming reimburses the large corporations who own the rights to songs through licensing. The added benefit of the mobile network is that the app services can obtain your consumer data, sell you advertisements and, especially in the case of Spotify, can even charge you for doing so.
TikTok is the devil’s mistress of all online music consumption, and I have a very special bone to pick with its perpetuation of neo-liberal capitalist ideas. Whilst streaming has blurred the lines of music promotion and consumption, presenting you with new music whist also selling it to you, TikTok takes full advantage of the convenience and speed of the IT sector and in doing so, has reduced musical originality to short snippets of potential revenue. It fully captures the idea of regressive listening, with the interactive nature of the product and consumer, meaning a song needs only a short hook, a few lyrics or a dance routine to capture your attention. This is another reason why I’m sick to death of As It Was. If I scroll through my Instagram Reels, which are barely distinguished from videos uploaded to TikTok (which I simply refuse to download out of protection for my scary ability to procrastinate) I will watch five videos in a row of the same damn riff of the intro. I don’t want to hear it anymore. It’s like in Kill Bill whenever The Bride sees her enemy and that infamous piercing siren sounds in her head and she has flashbacks to her wedding – the synth is the siren in my villain arc.
Incorporating a short and catchy riff like this on TikTok is so important in the world of music advertising. Television adverts relied on personalised jingles to always associate their brand with a short snappy sound, as I’m sure you can hear the line Auto Glass repair, Auto Glass replace. But there was a shift from jingles to using segments of mainstream pop music – the most successful example being John Lewis’ Christmas advert where people actually became excited to hear what cover they were going to use next to sell their products. Another example that comes to mind is Wouldn’t It Be Nice on some mobile network advert that I feel like I have mentally refused to acknowledge out of rebellion for how annoying the use of The Beach Boys is.
This type of use of music in adverts leads to market segmentation and targets specific groups of consumers (do any young people need an advert for a mobile network? I think the use of The Beach Boys is probably very relevant for your grandparents who also probably do need a mobile network). The boundaries between advertising and normal music have been elided, and songs are commercialised and produced to create a short segment you will remember. There is no distinction between art and commerce. While mainstream music industries may be experiencing progress with the need to drive up production for this sort of audience, independent and grassroots musicians who don’t make music to fit the archetype of a Tesco advert jingle are required to do even more work. They must self-promote on social media to garner whatever income they can when the music industry fails them to cope with the conditions of making music in a neo-liberal culture.
The problem with the need for more catchy mainstream music, especially with a goal of going viral on social media, is that there are now constant turnovers in the forms of production and consumption. With the rapidly changing nature of what is current and trending, the cycle of supply and demand is only increasing. We need more music and more marketing gimmicks. This leads to the downfall of pop music in terms of how quickly it can become obsolete and needs to be replaced. If this doesn’t convince you that pop is not a genre but a brand you buy into, I don’t know what will. TikTok is the most malicious consumption web where the doom-scrolling you participate in to gain short, sweet bursts of serotonin for escapism means you are just a capitalist consumer without thinking.
If, like me, you are feeling nihilistic, depressed and stressed at how inescapable capitalism feels, I’d like to end this article with a request for you to watch a clip of Tim Curry in the 2008 video game Red Alert 3, (which I have been informed is a very relevant game with attack bears). It also contains a quote that echoes around my head every time I think of the deeply entrenched shame at our socioeconomic state – “I’m escaping to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by Capitalism… Space!”.