What is the value of music?
We often think of this question in economic terms, but it doesn’t always have to do with money. After all, there’s a value difference between someone strumming a guitar at home versus playing in a band trying to land a major label deal. And the value of music to a label head likely varies from say…the kids throwing a day time rave under a bridge.
Each has its own kind of “value,” but these values are not the same and depend on factors varying from the deeply personal to the all-encompassing meat grinder that is capitalism.
Parsing out these different kinds of values is the focus of Making Value: Music, Capital and the Social, a recent book by our guest this episode, Timothy D. Taylor, Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. In the book, Taylor takes a novel approach, using anthropological value theory to examine how people’s ideas about value shape both the production and consumption of music while theorizing on the relationship between music’s economic and noneconomic forms.
The result is a more a more comprehensive and complicated look at life and music under capitalism, one in which supposedly non-commodified, utopian spaces outside the market turn out to be far messier and more entangled within its overarching structures that we’d often like to admit.
Sam and Taylor dive deep into this topic, tracing threads from Echo Park’s indie scene of the 2010s to Franz Liszt’s 19th-century star power to broad conceptions of gift-giving through the work of Marcel Mauss.
