Introduction

The music business can be defined as the ensemble or complex of practices and institutions that make possible and regulate the production, distribution and consumption of music.

Since music is generally situated in the sphere of the communicative, this definition has the merit of being structurally homologous with the tripartite and venerable model of communication that posits a linear relay between sender, message and receiver. For the purpose of this chapter, it also provides the boundary that ‘contains’ its primary object of analysis: the role of intellectual property rights in relation to the music business.

Any sustained attempt to unpack the components of ‘production’, ‘distribution’ or ‘consumption’ would immediately and inevitably begin to complicate and problematise this neat triad. For instance, should ‘production’ include performance and recording as well as composition, and, if so, in what dimension? And how far can a model of musical production (or any form of semiotic or symbolic production) be based on the political economy categories of relations, forces and means of production? Here is one of the – no doubt several – junctures where such an analysis would be confronted by Adorno, who, it will be recalled, deployed certain categories drawn from the discourse of production in his Philosophy of Modern Music and elsewhere.

The sphere of ‘distribution’ could in turn be subject to examination. If the ‘work’ of the composer – while recognising the complexities of this category evident in the papers from the previous Liverpool Music Symposium – is taken as axiomatic of a certain type of ‘production’, then its performance or its recording might be identified as ‘distribution’. But in those modes of musical practice where the creation of recordings can plausibly be regarded as belonging to the sphere of ‘production’ the more mundane industrial processes of manufacturing, marketing and retailing would occupy the space of ‘distribution’. Here, too, would probably be the place of the ‘cultural intermediaries’ of music, such as broadcasters and journalists.

In turn, the space of ‘consumption’ must be orientated to that most Janus-faced of signifiers, ‘the market’, with its twin denotations as a simple geographical space of exchange and as the most ideologically charged category of classical economics.