ABSTRACT
As globalisation unfolds, more places are drawn into the reach of companies distributing music beyond its country of origin, though this process has been very selective (Chapter 3). This has involved the increasing penetration of American and European record companies into new territories (Sadler 1997), global distribution of both relatively ‘universal’ and more specific ‘national market’ recordings (such as Latin music), and some measure of standardisation in the music product, with new formats (CD, MiniDisc) and digital transmission. The shifts towards digital recording and global music distribution, and their impacts, are analysed in this chapter. Music as a ‘digital’ product is now one niche within much larger information and media empires while, at the same time, the emergence of digital music recording, storage and distribution has presented challenges to established ways of producing, buying and listening to music. As the speed of flows of culture increases (with ever more places subsumed into the networks of influence of media corporations), digital technologies have an increasingly important role to play in how we hear music. Technological shifts link people in diverse places, increasing the range of music available and, in turn, allowing various cities, towns and regions to contribute to global cultural economies, promoting local music much more effectively to outside audiences. Such decentralising effects, associated with the expansion of computer-mediated communication (Internet, email, intranets), present challenges for music economies, although they too are mediated by issues of uneven access to technology and telecommunications infrastructures. This chapter examines how the corporate domination of cultural industries has influenced music, its marketing and its sounds; whether the emergence of digital music, and new forms of distribution such as the Internet, ‘democratise’ the world of music; how Internet cultures have changed the way music is thought of as information and whether major music companies will be able to ‘control’ how people access, reproduce and share music in the computer age. An important starting point is to consider the ways in which music has become part of a much wider ‘information’ economy.
