Music and Capitalism ─ A History of the Present

The aim of Music and Capitalism is to add to the small but now fast-growing number of works that have appeared in the twenty-first century on capitalism in an effort to restore it as an important, and, Tim Taylor would say,the most important, site of cultural analysis. Taylor has organized this book around concepts and cases that show how Euro-American capitalism works, and has worked, with respect to music. Some of these cases focus on moments when new communications or other technologies appear that altered people’s relationship to music; various recording and playback devices such as digital recording and playback; and others that address questions of marketing and advertising, for these practices are potent in inflecting or even assigning meanings to commodities of all kinds.
Taylor takes up where Adorno’s work left off by studying music in today’s “new capitalism,” which has been powerfully shaped by neoliberal ideologies and policies. Taylor focuses on the new modes of the production and consumption of music, new forms of the marketing of music and musicians, and changes in the cultural industries. These and other themes are treated in this synthetic work that draws on the empirical research Taylor has conducted for nearly two decades on music and technology, the history of broadcast music, the use of music in advertising, and the globalization of popular musics. It promises to be of interest to anyone with a stake in music.

Timothy D. Taylor is professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of several books, most recentlyThe Sounds of Capitalism, also published by the University of Chicago Press.