“Never Mind What’s Been Selling, It’s What You’re Buying”: Capital Exchange in Buying, Collecting, and Selling Vinyl Records
International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch
IASPM-US, San Diego, California, May 31, 2009.
This paper’s title is taken from a song by Fugazi.
Abstract
Record fairs are regular events in which dealers rent tables from the organizers to sell vinyl records, CDs, and music memorabilia to the general public. While dealers are materially invested in the fair, paying a table fee to the organizer and strategically rotating their stock between fairs, record collectors can be said to be emotionally invested in the business (and capital) of fandom. The business pressures facing record fair dealers are varied: they must negotiate large temporal and geographic intervals to cater to collectors of many genres, navigating between a continually discriminating level of connoisseurship on one hand and a consistently shrinking secondary market for vinyl records on the other, with little promise of financial remuneration. So, who holds the upper hand at record fairs? The dealers sell the commodities, yes, but the collectors decide what to buy, from whom, and (often, via bargaining) for what price. While dealers frequently self-identify as collectors, interactions between dealers and collectors necessarily rely upon the commodity status of music recordings and their role in the exchange of economic, cultural, and social capital. Given this multitude of stakes—material investment and emotional investment, business pressures, discriminatory purchasing power, dealers’ self-identity as collectors, and the commodity status of recordings, among others—in what ways can we situate and understand the economic activities that take place at record fairs? What can we learn about the relationships between dealers and collectors (economic or otherwise) through ethnography? Finally, how can a nuanced understanding of this culturally specific entanglement of social, symbolic, and material stakes contribute to existing theories of capital exchange (broadly defined) within popular music studies? Through ethnographic research at Chicago-area record fairs, I explore the tensions between record dealers and record collectors, and investigate the ways in which capital and exchange contribute to musical meaning.
Part of the organized panel Rethinking Capital and Ethnography in Popular Music Studies. Panelists:
Michael Figueroa
Andrew Mall
Monica Mays
Kaley Mason (chair)
Panel abstract
The concept of capital has a rich intellectual tradition. Thinkers such as Marx (1867), Bourdieu (1984), Thornton (1996), and Lin (2001) (among others), in describing the various ways that human agents negotiate exchange, have provided a number of perspectives through which popular music scholars from an ever-increasing list of disciplinary and methodological backgrounds examine the ways in which agents participate in the creation, distribution, reception, and meaning-making of popular music. Additionally, through capital we can interrogate social relations of musical production as class struggles entangled with other distinctions of ethnicity, gender, nationality, politics, race, religion, and sexuality.
Yet, often such powerful theoretical perspectives are privileged (explicitly or implicitly) over the lived experiences and self-conceptualizations of participants within popular music cultures. Ethnography provides a methodological corrective, through which a nuanced consideration of the voices, actions, and experiences of participants can contribute to existing discourses on the status and role of capital within popular music studies.
This panel, then, asks two questions: Firstly, in what ways do the multiple concepts of capital (economic, cultural, subcultural, social, etc.) contribute to a richer understanding of the material and lived experiences of popular music participants? Secondly, to what degree can ethnography allow popular music scholars to rethink existing theoretical paradigms without imposing pre-conceived models on human agents?
In answering these questions, these papers consider why and how music matters in contemporary uneven and stratified social life. Rather than produce three theoretical “what is capital?” papers, each presenter explores distinct popular music case studies, utilizing both the theoretical concept(s) of capital and the lived experiences of participants to examine the ways in which meaning and music are intertwined within both the academy and culturally-specific lived realities.