The Price of Profit? Changing and Challenging Priorities in the Christian Recording Industry
Society for Ethnomusicology
SEM, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 17, 2011 (joint with CORD).
Material from this paper was published in God Rock, Inc.
Abstract
Observers of the Anglo-American popular music recording industry have long considered the presumptive priority of profit when examining major record labels, all of whom are divisions of multi-national corporations. Profit is claimed to be a motivating factor behind artistic decisions, corporate expansions and consolidations, technological innovations, and so on. Critics argue that this negatively impacts artistic creativity and democratic participation within the recording industry (Hesmondhalgh 1997); others caution that popular musics’ resistant ideologies are made ambivalent by participation in capitalist markets (Keightley 2001); still others suggest that profitability is not diametrically opposed to either artistic creativity or resistant ideology (Frith 1981). Within the Christian recording industry, these discourses are further complicated by varying interpretations of Christian theology (Peacock 1999).
In this paper, I examine EMI Christian Music Group (CMG), a major Christian record label (and division of EMI Ltd.), headquartered near Nashville, Tennessee. My ethnographic fieldwork in the Christian recording industry and interviews with EMI CMG executives and former personnel, conducted during 2009–2011, simultaneously confirm profitability’s priority over aesthetic and theological concerns while revealing complications prompted by changing conditions in the music market of the early 21st century. In considering these market challenges and the diverse theological orientations of EMI CMG’s target audiences, I provide a value-neutral analysis of the intersections of commerce, aesthetics, and theology. As with Keith Negus’s (1992, 1999) ethnographic research within the recording industry, my study illustrates that major record label practices and priorities are more nuanced than may be visible to outside observers.
Part of the organized panel Ethnomusicology within Music Industries. Panelists:
Jayson Beaster-Jones
K. E. Goldschmitt
Andrew Mall
Alejandro Madrid (chair)
Panel abstract
Ethnomusicology’s relationships with music industries have, until recently, been characterized by symbiosis (Cottrell 2010). Fieldworkers have benefitted from the improvement of recording technologies, additional loci of funding and venues for research, and larger supply of ethnographic texts (as commercially-available recordings) provided by recording companies. While ethnographies on music industries have become increasingly critical in the last few decades, most ethnographic research has been limited to the experiences of musicians and audiences. However, participant-observation within music industries can deepen discourses on the status and role of business as well as questions regarding the multifarious modes of music commodification.
This panel addresses two sets of questions. First, how might ethnomusicologists reconsider diverse notions of music industries in ways that will contribute to richer understandings of the material and lived experiences of musicians, producers, mediators, and audiences? Second, to what degree can ethnographies of music industries enrich current scholarship and enhance existing theoretical paradigms? In answering these questions, these papers consider the roles of industries in articulating music matters in contemporary social life and illuminate the ways in which ethnomusicological representations of music industries align with industry participants’ conceptualizations of their own roles and work. Each presenter explores distinct case studies—music retail in India, the U.S. Christian recording industry, and the Brazilian independent recording industry—utilizing both theoretical concepts of industries alongside participants’ lived experiences to examine how music, and its meanings, are intertwined within both the academic field and culturally-specific lived realities.