https://www.dukeupress.edu/making-value

Kenzell Huggins:    This book draws from an eclectic mix of data, building on ethnographic exploration of Irish music sessions, interviews with members of a Los Angeles independent music scene, to the history of early touring musicians. What inspired you to combine these contexts throughout the book, and what did thinking across these contexts contribute to the formation of your arguments about value?

Timothy Taylor: I might as well start with a confession: my Ph.D. was in historical musicology, though I have slowly drifted towards ethnomusicology—the department where I am housed at UCLA—and anthropology, having married a prominent anthropologist over thirty years ago. Musicology, when I was taught, was concerned mainly with western European classical music and, to some extent, jazz. The rest of the world’s musics were left to ethnomusicologists. (The study of popular music didn’t really break in until the 1990s, and that came from cultural studies, not the music fields, though they eventually picked it up.) So, I was well, if conventionally, trained in western European classical music, which explains that discussion in the book, which considers the rise of the virtuoso, aided by agents, who helped create musical spectacles to generate income.

Once I started to read anthropological theory (with thanks here to Steve Feld, Fred Myers, Hannah Appel, and Jessica Cattelino), I began to consider or rethink issues related to conceptions of value in music scenes with which I was familiar—the LA indie rock scene (with help from one of my graduate students Shelina Brown), and the (meager) Irish traditional music scene in LA, in which I am an active participant as a wooden flute player.

Kenzell Huggins:    Throughout the text you reject an all-encompassing view of capitalism as always already structuring all forms of value-making. Instead, you show how separate regimes of value are absorbed by capital or even maintained as a certain kind of reserve (Chap. 5). How do we protect or cultivate these spaces of cultural production hopefully outside of capitalism? For outsides maintained as reserves, should branded capitalist endorsement be viewed as lifelines promoting growth, exploitation, or perhaps something else?

Timonty Taylor: Before I started to read value theory, I was nonetheless immersed in questions about capitalism, globalization, and more specifically, commodification and consumption. There seems to me to have been a tacit assumption in the music fields and in cultural studies that popular music was a commodity in some kind of straightforward and unchanging way. Many famous writings in anthropology contradict this idea of the stability of the commodity situation (as Appadurai calls it), of course, but these writings that might disabuse us of that notion weren’t always read, at least in the corner of academia I inhabit. So, a good deal of my recent work has been to complicate conceptions of music as a commodity.

I continued to be interested in questions of commodification and, more recently, scalability (thanks to Anna Tsing). It may seem that capitalism suffuses our world, which is awash in commodities. But most of the musicians I know aren’t able to commodify their music or commodify it to the extent that they can scale its consumption sufficient to make a living. Capitalism may appear to be everywhere, but as we know from Tsing and others, it comes and goes from patches around the world. Capitalism is a set of hegemonic ideologies—a structure in the practice theory sense—but actual practices on the may or may not by shaped by it.

I’ve come to think of capitalism as a kind of hegemonic environment but not total, and with nodes of concentrated capitalist activity, like record labels or film and television studios (my interests) but also, of course, obvious places such as bangs and the tech industry. Focusing on agents such as music managers (or matsutake mushroom gatherers) helps us understanding how capitalist value can be created.

Given its reach and hegemony, it’s easy to attribute agency to capitalism; I do it myself. It’s simpler to say that capitalism did something, or that something happened because of capitalism. Instead of talking so much about capitalism as though it were an agent, we need to think about the actual human agents: who is figuring out ways that something that was previously uncommodified is transformed into a commodity? Commodities are so prevalent that they blind us to other forms of the creation of value and its exchange, as we know from Mauss and others, but many things are never commodified; most music isn’t.

We need to attend to specific cases, which is what I do in some chapters, like the one on music managers. People attempting to get into the record business seldom have any idea of how that business works—they need a manager who can help educate them and mold them into people who can generate surplus value for a label. I’m interested in such figures as these.

As for the question about protecting those forms of cultural production outside of capitalism, I’m not sure that’s our remit. But I would say that they’re all over, we just tend not to take them seriously. Most people who study music—from whatever disciplinary perspective—tend to study the extraordinary musicians. But these are rare; there are many more musicians who aren’t extraordinary, aren’t making a living. They are, however, making value, for themselves and perhaps others and are no less worthy of study.

Kenzell Huggins:    In Chapter 2, you argue that music industries have historically acknowledged that creative production is hard to scale because there are limits on how much new work any given musician can produce. However, you spend some time on counterexamples, including a brief gesture to the Korean music industry, especially K-pop, as industries that are modeled on the manufacturing of stars and hits (p. 44-45). What does the still-growing success of the Korean music industry (most recently exemplified by the success of K-Pop Demon Hunters [2025], perhaps) have to tell us about the possibilities of scaling cultural production to create value?

Timothy Taylor: Until fairly recently, people in the record business would seek and sign multiple acts that they thought might be profitable. But a few decades ago, the cultural business (such as music, publishing, film, and others) shifted to a blockbuster model, since it’s much cheaper to sign one artist who could sell seven million albums than to signing seven artists who can sell a million each, because you’re only producing one recording so there’s much less studio time and money, less money expended on marketing and advertising, and so forth. The rise of social media makes it much easier for record labels to discern who has a large following, how active and skilled an artist is on social media (which matters a great deal today), how adept they are at creating, maintaining, and increasing their fan base. This is the main way that the western record business tries to achieve scalability.

I’m not a scholar of K-pop, but the Korean case seems to me to be unique. It’s more like the old model except more industrialized: young musicians are located, trained, groomed for stardom; as far as I know, there is a kind of industrial infrastructure unlike anything in the west. Some achieve it, some don’t. If it doesn’t exist already, it would be useful to have an ethnography of how this all works, especially in the context of South Korea’s rise to becoming an industrial giant in the same period.

There is, however, the case of Sweden. A few decades ago, the Swedes realized that their country was profiting more from ABBA and other popular musicians than from iron. The government began subsidizing local music centers that lent people instruments, amps, and other gear so that there were few or no barriers to making music. Sweden is now one of the top exporters of music in the world, along with the US, UK, and South Korea.

Kenzell Huggins:    Cultural commentators increasingly claim that the models of other cultural production industries (like film and television) are shifting away from non-scalable creative labor to increasingly mechanized or manufactured models. The adoption of generative artificial intelligence in these industries also threatens traditional assumptions about the scalability of creativity. Both issues of labor as well as the threat of generative AI were principal concerns of the 2023 Hollywood strikes. How do models of creative cultural production have to change to account for emerging technological shifts and evolving labor practices?

Timothy Taylor: There is already AI-generated music and I’m sure that there will be much more. Music not deemed to be important (in advertising, background to homemade videos, and so on) will be largely AI-generated. But to be clear, unimportant music has existed for centuries; most music served some sort of tangible, visible, function, in worship, dance, entertainment, passing the time while working, to demonstrate one’s power over others, and more. Mozart once complained to his father that at one concert, “I had to play to the chairs, tables, and walls”—the aristocrats in attendance considered his music to be part of the background. Only since the rise of the idea of art-for-art’s-sake in the nineteenth century was some music—western European classical music—placed on a pedestal and exalted for not having any function, except perhaps for enlightening and ennobling bourgeois listeners, and later, for demonstrating social status. Bespoke music will increasingly become a boutique item, something relatively rare and special. It will become a touted feature of certain television shows and films.

Kenzell Huggins:  On page 140-141, you write about the need for music studies to produce new scholarship beyond functionalist reassertions of the ability of music to represent and sustain community, suggesting that a Geertzian attention to social actors’ own meanings as values can help to provide routes to innovative scholarship. This is a compelling call to action. What do you think are the horizons of research for cultural and social scientific studies of music and other media? What is the role of classic theories in informing (or not!) those horizons?

Timothy Taylor: I have been trying my whole career—thirty-plus years—to bringing more social theory, especially from anthropology, into the music fields. It has been a slow process. Most of us start as musicians and are thus drawn to particular kinds of music to study, which we tend to examine in fairly technical ways. It has been difficult to break this formalistic orientation; some people in ethnomusicology view knowledge of social theory as a a kind of capital to be flaunted; some think theory takes one away from “the music itself”; some think it will compromise one’s ethnography because it transforms the ethnographer from a blank, all-observing slate into someone who can only see class struggle or the patriarchy or racism or homophobia or something else.

At UCLA, I created a specialization in anthropology in my department. Graduate students who opt in take the three core courses in UCLA’s Anthropology Department and must write one of their Ph.D. qualifying exams under the aegis of an anthropologist, and must have an anthropologist on their dissertation committee. Many of our students following this specialization, and I think it has helped them considerably in their dissertation design, research, and writing. And it helps make them stronger candidates on the job market.

As for the future, I think that we need to continue to attend to real people in real places and times. Theory needs an object; I have no interest in what Bourdieu called “theoretical theory.” We must put theory in constant dialogue with our ethnographic data—and vice versa. To echo what I said above, I also think it’s of paramount importance to look not just at capitalism but as capitalists: who is making decisions that, to recall Anna Tsing one last time, introduce alienation? Commodification? Scalability?

Here’s an example. I have a friend who accompanied President Obama to Cuba in 2016 after the president had normalized relations. The Rolling Stones gave a free concert during Obama’s visit, and Coca-Cola wanted to sponsor an after-party. But there was a problem—as my friend put it, “In Cuba, Cuba is the brand.” So, Raúl Castro was approached, and he gave his permission. My friend said that for the next concert, potential sponsors could ask Castro to approve sponsorship of the concert itself since, after all, he had approved an earlier sponsorship. This would be the way that capitalism came to Cuba, my friend said. Understanding capitalism’s agents must be central to what any study of capitalism itself.

I also think a lot of classic social theory is still relevant or can be made to be relevant. I think that many fields in the humanities and softer social sciences have become trendified, picking up and discarding theoretical perspectives so quickly that key insights aren’t given enough space or are overlooked altogether. Or, if one aspect of a particular theorist’s work fades into disuse, we ignore what might still be useful. Geertz is a good example here. He’s been critiqued for a number of things, but his central premise—that people are meaning-seeking begins and that we should focus our studies on what is meaningful to our interlocutors—is still powerful. Theories come and go, meaningfulness does not.