Robert Burnett’s (1996:144) prophesy that ‘continued transnationalization is generally expected to result in the emergence or survival of roughly a half dozen mega media giants who will dominate the global market by the turn of the century’ suggested that multiculturalism would be of little importance to the international music industry by the year 2000. However, the very industry which Burnett (1996:9) blames for ‘the rise of a global homogenous world culture’ is also the industry which, in summer 1987, created the ‘world music’ category in its record stores, demonstrating its interest in the production and consumption of music outside the Anglo-American mainstream (Guilbault 2001:176,191). As Jan Fairley (2001:274-5) notes, this marketing strategy is viewed by pessimists to embody appropriation, and by optimists to embody hybridity, meaning that both negative and positive reasons for the importance of multiculturalism have been suggested. Investigation of commentary on the music industry, together with analysis of selected industry products, will show whether it is the pessimistic or the optimistic explanation that has greatest validity.

In order to appreciate the importance of multiculturalism to the music industry, we first need to explore the concept of multiculturalism, and its associated terms. Anthropologists’ definitions of ‘culture’ range from Edward Taylor’s 1871 view concerning the role of man in society, to Adam Kauper’s 1994 description of a form of communal exchange built upon particular human skills (Monaghan & Just 2000:34-52). John Monaghan and Peter Just (2000:35) cite their own definition as ‘shared patterns of learned behaviour’, suggesting a phenomenon which consistently unites, identifies and characterises one particular group of people, and sets them in contrast to other groups. This ‘conception of cultures as spheres’ becomes ‘interculturality’ where there are differences between cultures, and becomes ‘multiculturality’ when ‘intercultural conflicts’ occur ‘within one and the same state community’ (Featherstone & Lash 1999:196). Multiculturalism has the musical consequences of ‘juxtapositions and unpredictable mixtures’, producing a ‘sound aesthetic that stretches as an umbrella over musics that express collective identity’ (Bohlman 2002:60,85,131). The use of multiculturalism by the international music industry typically sets the West in opposition to its ‘musical others’ (Bohlman 2000:188-191), musics contained within the ‘world music’ category.

To understand why multiculturalism is so important to the international music industry, we need to appreciate the nature of the industry itself. As Burnett (1996:52,72,91) notes, the industry’s most important asset is artists ‘likely to write or record hit songs’, but few manage to do so; of every ten records produced, only two or three actually sell, and fewer than a fifth of the CDs released become popular enough to sell the 250,000 copies required to recoup production costs. R. Serge Denisoff (1975:97) calls this ‘the buckshot theory’, a reading supported by Will Straw (2001:54) who suggests that, unlike the broadcasting and advertising industries, the music industry releases products without first investing in consumer research. This leaves the music industry, as Walter Benjamin (Burnett 1996:32,35) put it, ‘following rather than leading’ the taste of an audience, who decide what is popular by allocating their money and listening time. Jacques Attali (1985:40) agrees, saying that the industry’s income depends on the ‘quantity of demand for labour’ rather than the ‘quantity of labour’. This means that, in order to survive, the international music industry has no choice but to create a ‘routine, predictable’ output, using working methods ‘guaranteed to produce a product acceptable to the widest range of consumers’ (Burnett 1996:104).

The competitive nature of the music industry suggests that appropriation would not be out of the question if this gave the industry greater control over the artists it relies upon. As Steven Feld (1999:147,150,52-3) notes, it is easier for the industry to establish an ‘exploitative labour relationship’ with world music artists than with a Western pop artist, because the West views ‘world’ musicians as ‘third world’ musicians. Paul Simon’s Graceland is often used to exemplify such exploitative labour relationships. Fairley (2001:285-6) believes the relationship between Simon and the non-Western musicians he engaged was ‘unequal’, as Simon alienated the Los Lobos group by taking ownership even for the tracks on which he was merely ‘arranger rather than originator of material’. Even though Homeless, for example, appears to have been created jointly by Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s Joseph Shabalala, the liner notes still read ‘All Songs Copyright 1986 Paul Simon’ (Warner Brothers, 1986). Louise Meintjes (1990:47-8) believes that the multicultural nature of Graceland made it as much about noncollaboration -- ‘appropriation, exploitation, domination’ -- as about collaboration, and even asserts that true collaboration ‘cannot readily occur within the contemporary international music industry without challenging the institution’s power structure’. As Charles Hamm (1989:299-304) points out, the record labels, not Simon, gained greatest financial benefit from the noncollaborative nature of the project. Thus multiculturalism is important because it enables the music industry to preserve commercial stability while releasing music from the ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘aggrieved populations’ of ‘tropical countries’ (Guilbault 2001:176-8).

Multiculturalism is also important in highlighting that it is not just through contractual structures that the music industry can establish exploitative commercial relationships. For example, the industry made no deliberate arrangement to deprive Solomon Linda of $15 million yet, according to the research and hindsight of Rian Malan (2003), this is the sum Linda lost in not securing royalties for Mbube prior to the song’s fifty years in the ‘pop-music food chain’. As Hugo Zemp (1996:37) notes, payment within cultures not trading in money can be equally problematic; one Solomon Islands ensemble was rewarded only with shells: surely an infringement of the 1956 Copyright Act, which prohibits the use of a creative work without exchange of ‘a suitable royalty or licensing fee’ (Robertson & Nicol 1984:131). Exploitation can also occur through the work of ethnomusicologists who, despite ethical intentions, use music industry recording products to document their findings, so ‘more and more, ethnomusicogical research and commercial exploitation are getting intertwined’ (Zemp 1996:36). One possible example of this is Feld’s work on the Kaluli people, Papua New Guinea; although Feld engaged the musicians for academic purposes, his recordings were sold on Rykodisc’s Voices of the Rainforest (1991). As Feld (1999:166) himself notes:

community trust, academic recognition, and institutional prestige mean little when you are up against international entertainment law, major record companies, the media and marketing world, music collecting agencies, and highly paid, highly protected, pop stars.

Thus the meeting of multiculturalism with the inherent instability and complexity of the music industry is important: by establishing exploitative relationships with the musicians on which it relies, it causes the industry to present a negative public image.

The negative effects of the music industry’s espousal of multiculturalism are not just apparent to the performer, according to some commentators. Philip Bohlman (2002:xii) explains that, in the pessimistic view, appropriation by a culturally-exploitative global music industry is equally detrimental for the listener:

World music can raise fears that we are losing much that is close to home. Its homogenizing effect threatens village practices as it privileges the spaces of the global village . . . Fusion and border-crossing may enrich some world-music styles, but they impoverish others.

To apply Mark Slobin’s (1993:11-23) terms to this analysis, Bohlman appears to describe a situation in which, because industry has turned ‘local’ musics into ‘transnational’ micromusics, commodified ‘interculture’ has replaced ‘subculture’ with one bland ‘superculture’; listeners have to adopt global ‘ideoscapes’ because their ‘mediascapes’, ‘technoscapes’ and ‘finanscapes’ have been globalized. Peter Jowers’ (1993:55) view, that the music industry mediascape has produced an ‘aleatory’ and ‘schizophrenic condition’, is echoed by Feld’s criticisms. Feld’s ‘From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis’ (1994) discusses the music industry as an agent of sonic dislocation and distortion, while his ‘Sweet Lullaby for World Music’ (Feld 1999:145-6) blames the ‘merger and consolidation’ within the industry for the ‘transnational flows of technology, media and popular culture’ which have turned particular musical styles into the continuous transience of ‘fission and fusion’. Feld (1999:145-6) even believes that cultural history has been cancelled because ‘sonic virtuality’ -- enabled by technology that makes all musical worlds ‘transportable or hearable in all others’ -- has become unremarkable. These criticisms all suggest that multiculturalism is important to the music industry because, in proliferating the fusion of micromusics for commercial gain, the industry has replaced multiculturalism with the single artificial culture of its own creation.

However, while ‘industry produces culture . . . culture also produces industry’ (Negus 1999:144). This invites speculation that the industry’s use of multiculturalism is no more than a response to the world from which the industry needs to draw profit. For Veit Erlmann (1999:282) this world is ‘now truly one’, something echoed by Sean Cubitt’s (1998:41-9) idea that an obsession with global culture has been symbolised, and even in part created, by the satellite images of Earth from Space. Thus the action of the music industry which Feld (1994:266-7) criticises, its marketing of the two distinct categories of “World Music” and “World Beat” as one synonymous experience of the global, may be no more than a prudent marketing strategy. Deep Forest: Bohême (Sony Music Entertainment, 1995) provides an example of a global commodity created from cultural fusion. Apart from giving track titles such as ‘Café European’ and ‘Bulgarian Melody’, the liner notes do not inform the customer about any particular culture, but simply create a loose sense of exoticism through the mysterious natural images. The non-Western musical elements, such as the high pitched male cries and the female vocalist’s part in ‘Martha’s Song’, are nothing more than ‘an opportunity to mix and blend’ as they fuse with the electronic bass and drum sound common to most Western pop. While Sony may have set out deliberately to mislead through convergence, it is more likely that the company is simply adopting the prudent business strategy of appealing to its customers’ wishes, customers informed by the perpetual ‘shopping element’ of their ‘McDonaldized’ culture (Tomlinson 1999:83,85). Thus multiculturalism is important to the music industry because it is an ineluctable feature of the ‘McWorld’ (Tomlinson 1999:83) in which it operates.

Although he discusses cultural imperialism, however, John Tomlinson’s (1999:71) principal argument is that true global culture, ‘the emergence of one single culture embracing everyone on earth and replacing the diversity of cultural systems that have flourished up to now’, has not arrived, and is not likely to. This is because, although the culture industries trade worldwide, people still identify with their national cultures; collective “world memories” are neither strong enough, nor positive enough, ever to engender a sense of globalization or global unity (Tomlinson 1999:100-105). Thus Tomlinson not only denies the cultural dominance of the West in the world, but also opposes the views of Feld, Jowers, Bohlman and Cubitt that twentieth-century technology and/or marketing methods have replaced local historical identity with post-modern eclecticism. This means that, even if the music industry’s use of multiculturalism is an inevitable feature of its structure and operating environment, it is important more for the beneficial reasons of hybridity and difference, than for commercial dominance, homogenisation or appropriation. One of the optimistic commentators supporting this view is Ian Anderson. Setting out to mock the critics of world music, Anderson (2000:37) states that ‘nowhere’ in the music industry’s use of multiculturalism is ‘the faintest whiff of exploitation, exclusivity, cliques, ghettoisation, conspiracies, [or] cultural imperialism . . .’. This is because the main agenda of the personnel who named the genre, in the Empress of Russia public house on 29th June 1987, was ‘to broaden the appeal of our repertoire’, making world music nothing more than ‘a box in a record shop’ (Anderson 2000:37,39). Thus multiculturalism is important because it forms a marketing tool that does not necessarily involve the industry oppressing either its customers or its employees.

What makes multiculturalism especially attractive to industry customers is the contrast it creates with the bulk of the listening repertoire, which has to be predictable enough to guarantee demand (Burnett 1996:104). This means reliance on recycling techniques, including production of cover versions and acquisition of back catalogues, which perpetuate certain tracks and stylistic traits. Even new Western forms are, Andrew Blake (1999:1-2) suggests, still ‘using conventional instruments, chords and lyrical ideas’, meaning that

New music repeats itself immediately and ad nauseam, new bands play old music. . . old bands . . . play their old songs, or new songs that sound very like the old ones.

In this context, the ‘abundance’, ‘diversity’ and ‘possibility’ (Bohlman 2002:xii) represented by world music can resist and break the recycling chain, offering brief respite for Anglo-American listeners, and fostering greater musical freshness and creativity (Guilbault 2001:178-80). Western interest in world music can stimulate the growth of local musics, such as the chicha dance music of the Andes, and the rock misrahi of Israel (Chanan 1995:174-5), and then allow worldwide access to them, such as via internet sites like http://www.hmv.com. Moreover, mediascape multiculturalism may reflect ‘authentic’ cultural undercurrents (Chanan 1995:177). Although Salsa’s ‘world of difference’ beach stereotype, for example, appealed to America’s indigenous population, it was primarily because of the 40 million Hispanics living within the United States that EMI, CBS (Sony), Polygram, BMG and Warner had all created ‘distinct Latin departments’ by the 1980s (Negus 1999:133-4,140). Similar reasons are given for the prevalence of African-Caribbean music in British cities (Bakari 1999:98). Thus, although recycling techniques are essential to the survival of the music industry, multiculturalism allows the industry to adopt a cosmopolitan marketing strategy; in reflecting contemporary diaspora this ensures that the widest possible audience is engaged.

Multiculturalism can even be important to the music industry because of its benefits to performers. Jocelyne Guilbault (2001:179-81) states that the Western interest in world music enables musicians to defy the music industry, helping them gain ‘independence’ from recording studios. While this would obviously concern the industry, the industry need not suffer for world musicians to gain. According to Fairley’s (2001:283-5) ‘Cooder paradigm’, it is possible for a world musician to be completely satisfied after participating in a Western recording project. Even if Ladysmith Black Mambazo were not prominent in Simon’s Graceland mix, they still reaped the financial benefit of promoting their politicised isicathamiya style to a global audience (Meintjes 1990:47). The fact that music can engender transcultural collaboration, the results of which are available internationally, is said by some to promote the pluralism of ‘democracy’ (Feld 1999:167) and even ‘peace’ (Tomlinson 1999:75). After all, it is for political reasons that David Fanshawe diverts his royalties from African Sanctus (Silva Screen Records, 1994) to the International Aid Organisation in Africa. Thus multiculturalism is important to the music industry because its public image can be improved by the benefits it and its artists bestow on local cultures.

Contradicting the earlier conclusion concerning treatment of world musicians, this latter point reminds us that, as Fairley (2001:274-5) and Feld (1999:151-4) have identified, the commentary on mediascape multiculturalism has created tropes of ‘anxiety and celebration’. While anxious narratives discuss appropriation: the exploitation of third world musicians and global banalisation of local culture, others celebrate hybridity: the benefit to third world musicians, and a cosmopolitan diversity of cultures. Certainly there is much about the music industry for pessimists to criticise, not least the homogenisation practices, although multiculturalism may both relieve these problems and exacerbate them. We must recall that our focus is the importance of multiculturalism to the music industry, not to the performers it employs or to the listeners it must engage. The music industry, as academics may forget, is not there to provide education on cultural relativism or to improve international relations. The raison d'être of the music industry is to make the profit without which it cannot survive to continue serving its customers. Multiculturalism builds upon the industry’s necessary recycling practices, yet retains an element of the diversity needed to attract the largest possible consumer base. In utilising multiculturalism, the music industry has found a viable marketing strategy; no industry has greater cause than this for celebration.

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DISCOGRAPHY

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