ABSTRACT
Following the problematization of the Hungarian pop-rock “music industry” and its embeddedness into global and local social, economic, and political structures, this chapter continues with the exploration of labor in a segment that remains relatively distinct from the rock-based, institutionalized and dominant “music industry.” This segment is the broadly understood hip hop music world, where work during the given time period was predominantly organized around song-centered collaborations and content creation for digital platforms, primarily YouTube, but also Facebook and Instagram, and to a lesser extent, music streaming platforms such as Spotify. The broad genre category used here includes songs in the more recent trap style, mainstream or “commercial” and underground hip hop, as well as R’n’B and pop songs whose creators are linked to the hip hop scene, and where the specificities of songwriting and producing are drawn from the genre conventions of hip hop (following a structure of vocals on backing “beats”). 1 In other words, although I refer to genre (conventions), I understand hip hop here rather as a broader genre aesthetic in the same way as pop-rock (Regev 2013) as defined in the previous chapter: an aesthetic which can be understood as part of the general “hiphopification” (Gamble 2022) of contemporary pop music, thus a move away from the pop-rock aesthetic paradigm. As I will demonstrate, this segment is less visible from the perspective of both state institutions and professional organizations of the “industry;” moreover, it is partly symbolically excluded based on its “low” social-cultural status. At the same time, the labor process is more directly integrated into the relations of global digital platform capitalism.
