Review — Making Value: Music, Capital, and the Social

Timothy D. Taylor. Making Value: Music, Capital, and the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024, $26.95 E-book.

From singing hymns in church, to passing buskers on the pavement, to strumming the guitar at my window, to playing an album on my phone as I type this very review, there are few instances throughout the day at which I am not surrounded, in some way, by music.

I know this is not a unique phenomenon, as increasing accessibility of musical recordings via streaming platforms has rendered listening to music a relatively ordinary activity. I also know that I am not alone in listening to or playing much of the same music—I might choose a single genre, artist, album or even song to repeat throughout any given day. Is it possible that what I value in my music selection has been moulded by a system existing beyond myself? Of course, I have my own opinions, but have these, in some way, been formed for me?

These are the types of questions prompted by Timothy D. Taylor’s Making Value: Music, Capital, and the Social. In the work, Taylor, who is Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA (USA) and author of Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production and Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, bridges anthropological value theory and practice theory together to ‘demonstrate how cultural goods, whether or not they are commodities, are meaningful and valuable to those who make and consume them’ [21]. In essence, he seeks to demonstrate how conception of value shapes music production and consumption.

He accomplishes this task by elucidating an important distinction between two forms of value—economic and noneconomic—to theorise music’s value ethnographically and historically. In Chapter 1, Taylor explores how forms of value which may not seem to be products of capitalism are still disciplined by it. While these apparently ‘noneconomic’ forms might be unquantifiable in terms of monetary value, Taylor argues that they coexist with—and necessarily support—the capitalist framework [24].

One of the strengths of this analysis lies in Taylor’s ability to illustrate and substantiate often complex and pithy theorisations of value with case studies, many of which will be familiar to (or easily grasped by) readers. Taylor explores the first chapter’s argument, for example, through three case studies on supply chains: first, the concert agent’s role in the burgeoning music industry at the turn of the nineteenth century; next, provenances acting as value-imbuing supply chains for art works, whereby works that pass through the hands of people thought to have “taste” increase in monetary value [33]; and finally, the ‘consecration of cultural practices’ through the bureaucracy of UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage process. Taylor, in exploring these varied cases, offers compelling models to illuminate his argument.

Chapter-length case studies allow the reader to delve in greater detail into the realities of noneconomic forms of value at the service of capitalism. In Chapter 5, for example, Taylor introduces the reader to the indie rock scene of Echo Park, a neighbourhood on the east side of Los Angeles, to demonstrate how fringe musical enterprises sustain the capitalist music industry. ‘The people who work in the Echo Park and similar scenes make so little money that it costs the capitalist music business virtually nothing to maintain this reserve army,’ he suggests, ‘an endless supply of young people struggling to make a living at music’ [133]. Taylor compellingly (and poignantly) illustrates how in this process, the fringe scene dies at the expense of the larger industry in a form of capitalist predation where ‘[m]any give up. A very few succeed and, in doing so, leave the scene for the capitalist music business’ [137].

Perhaps surprisingly, Taylor occasionally decentralises music to take a wider look at consumer culture. In Chapter 3, for example, he explores the practice of trendspotting and how consumer tastes can be disciplined—’harvested, codified, and reinforced or reshaped’—by independent trendspotting firms [73]. Citing an interview with Irma Zandl from 2016, Taylor ultimately points to trendspotting’s implementation as a slow-moving process. Somewhat ironically, the trend Zandl mentioned in the interview (skinny jeans) seems to have already fallen by the wayside, but the point remains: the things that stick, stick. It would be interesting to hear if Zandl would maintain this position in light of social media usage during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. But in any case, Taylor cedes to trendspotting’s encroachment on commercial culture, and his analysis is sure to prompt thought-provoking reevaluations of common preconceptions of value.

Making Value is the first systemisation of its kind, and as such, it certainly accomplishes its goal: to conceptualise the systems by and through which music, as a cultural good in a globalised industry, is produced and consumed. As Taylor concludes, ‘[r]egardless of speed or reach, all of the actions involved in making and listening to music and disseminating it reveal and produce what particular social actors value’ [189]. Perhaps this work will prompt others—as it did for this reader—to ask broader questions on how and why we value the many music we hear throughout our lives.