[This is a version of an essay I wrote for an online journal in 2024 that was never published.]
Let’s build a culture of musician solidarity across genres, practices, and scenes so that musicians can lead sustainable lives. (1)
My basic contention in this piece is that musicians are chronically and systematically under-compensated. (2) There are many structural factors in music industries that tend towards always underestimating the time, effort, and investment that goes into musical labor, and never the opposite. Musicians, like workers in many other fields, are part of a system that requires them to sell their labor power. That everyone but the very wealthy must sell their labor power is simply what it means to live in a capitalist society, and in the particular case of musicians, they must attain a very high level of skill to be competitive in the marketplace. (3) Musicians exist in a cultural context that constantly undervalues this labor power, and, crucially, tends to suggest that many aspects of what they do should not be legitimately understood as work. As a result, musical workers are prone to being exploited (often dramatically), to sustain a culture of exploitation, and also to self-exploit.
The target audience of this piece is musicians and other arts workers, as well as people who care about the well-being of arts workers. What I want to do here is state plainly, explicitly, and in detail what arts workers, for the most part, know intuitively as the result of their life experience in music professions. By way of doing this, I have eight suggestions.
Musicians should always insist that their musical workplaces pay fair wages, regardless of what kind of workplace it is.
I want to start with the practical end goal: musicians getting paid appropriately for their work. Clearly identifying what a “fair wage” would be is difficult, and is highly context-dependent, but we won’t get close to a definition if we don’t ask the question and grapple with the difficulties in answering it.
Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math and see where it gets us: imagine a musician gets paid $500 to play a 90-minute show. (4) Ostensibly that seems like a very good rate at $333.33 an hour. Once one imagines that there may have been, say, 6 hours of rehearsal, and that the musician may have practiced for an additional 6 hours, say, that rate decreases to $37 an hour. Things get trickier from there, which is where we start to see the problem. Certainly once one factors in administrative time—say, programming, scheduling, contracting other musicians, booking a venue etc.—the rate decreases further. This isn’t straightforward, though, as the musicians themselves might be doing all of this work, part of it, or very little of it. The overhead costs of instruments, gear, renting rehearsal space, etc. are additional considerations, as are the 10,000 hours (likely more) of practice/training required to get to proficiency, the debt from highly specialized education, etc., all of which should be factored into how one might think about a musician’s hourly rate. We’ll address all of this again later.
Again, this is tricky to calculate, and I’m not sure how one would go about coming up with a formula; this back-of-the-envelope math would be difficult to change into more precise math, and therein lies the challenge for musicians trying to get paid fairly. In short, given all of the various kinds of labor—spread out over years or even decades—that result in a musical performance, it seems impossible to account for it fully and rigorously. Thus, as I said at the beginning of this essay: the tendency in this world of hidden labor and hidden costs is always to underestimate the amount of labor and the financial investment, never the opposite. (5) Put differently, if the labor time is genuinely hard to calculate, what is the likelihood that an employer—even a well-intentioned one—will err in the direction that favors the workers?
Some of the project of achieving fair pay can and has been accomplished through unions. The work of unions in setting a basic scale of fees in many musical workplaces is and has been absolutely crucial, and we should all be grateful for their advocacy. (6) However, many musical spaces are not unionized and never will be. What I mean to be suggesting here is something that is more cultural: the overarching goal should be a fair wage in a musical workplace. This ought to go hand in hand with the work of unions.
2. Musicians should reflect on how exploitative dynamics play out in their own individual professional lives and in the lives of others.
I take exploitation to mean something basic and commonly understood: “[t]o exploit someone is to take unfair advantage of them,” (7) as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has it. If what you’re paid as a musician involves you being taken unfair advantage of, you’re being exploited.
The first step in building a strong culture of music artist-workers’ solidarity against exploitation is a change of consciousness. This involves, at least partially, seeing the circumstances of the musical economy clearly.
I hope you’ll reflect on how exploitative dynamics play out in your musical life. Here are some questions you could ask yourself: does this gig or job feel like it’s paying well enough for the work you’re doing? Do you find yourself doing less or worse work because of how much a gig or job pays? Are you doing hidden administrative or artistic planning work that you’re not being compensated for? Is your time being respected by the person who is employing you? How much debt do you have because of education and/or expensive equipment/instruments that are basic necessities for you to do your job?
You probably have many more questions along these lines. You probably low-key ask yourself these questions all the time, but let’s be really explicit about them. Let’s think about how much our time as musicians is worth, and about the relationship between the price of a commodity/service and the amount of labor time that goes into it.
I use the phrase “labor time” because music is a field that is labor- and time-based. Music performance happens in time. In order to be able to perform, musicians also practice and rehearse, both of which activities also happen in time. Of these three time-based practices, the performance is usually the only thing seen by most people, and is commonly understood (8) to be paid for in the guise of concert ticket sales, cover charges, etc. The performance, according to this logic, is the commodity/service described above. We, as a musical community, tacitly understand that musicians making music in professional settings need to get paid for the labor time that creates this commodity; and we think about that in a time-based way, maybe as an hourly wage or a fee for a performance that is of a more or less predetermined length.
We did some back-of-the-envelope math in point #1. The problem, though, is that that’s not the math usually done. Far more common is to do the math with the wrong set of inputs. What is easily overlooked or underestimated by audience members and people who employ or hire musicians—even very well-intentioned ones—is the enormous amount of labor time and financial investment that goes into getting the musicians onto the stage to do this work. This is something intuitively understood by most musicians, and perhaps known conceptually by others; but let’s try to drill down into it and be specific. Of all the things involved in producing a musical event, the performance time itself is by far the least amount of the total time spent; there is an extraordinary amount of hidden labor time. (9) Musicians usually rehearse for substantially more time than they perform. Before and between the rehearsals, the musicians also likely practice for more time than they rehearse. (10) In order to attain a skill level at which they can give professional-grade performances, musicians will have had to practice for years if not decades. And they continue to do so throughout their careers. (You may or may not buy Malcolm Gladwell’s famous “10,000 hour rule”—the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill, described in his book Outliers: The Story of Success; regardless, that this rule was formulated based on a study of violinists is suggestive.)
In addition to an enormous amount of time honing their craft, in many cases musicians must have expensive and extensive music education (11)—ranging from individualized private lessons at a young age to costly (and usually debt-producing) training in higher education. (12) During their higher education years, they spend hours every day in practice rooms; this is so pervasive that it’s a cliché regarding the impoverished social lives of students in music school. Often expensive—in some cases truly outrageously priced (as in the case of high-end violins, say)—instruments and/or gear are required. In many institutions, specialized administrators organize musical activities; or the musicians perform this labor themselves. This, clearly, is also labor time, and when administration is a stand-alone job, these workers are often (but not always) adequately compensated. (13) This is telling. It reflects the fact that people understand this to be work, and that it needs to be compensated.
Quite simply, an immense amount of both labor time and financial investment goes into setting even the most basic conditions for a musical performance. What Karl Marx calls the “congealed labor-time” that goes into the production of a musical commodity is orders higher than what is represented to the audience when they go to a performance.
So far I’ve presented the tendency to devalue musical labor as something generalized, a sort of accepted culture logic that is not always straightforwardly stated but always present as an underlying assumption. Sometimes, however, it is made explicit and can be actively weaponized. During the brief strike of National Symphony Orchestra musicians in September 2024, the orchestra (i.e., the organization, not the musicians) posted the following to social media by way of arguing against higher wages for musicians: "NSO musicians are scheduled to work an average of 20 hours a week with rehearsals and concerts, leaving time to pursue teaching or other sources of income." The post was widely ridiculed by musicians and subsequently deleted. Both that it was posted in the first place and that it became the object of immediate scorn testifies to the wide gap in understanding between musical workers and those who view their labor from the outside.
3. Musicians should become comfortable making their solidarity explicit with each other and using labor-related language.
A factor that mitigates towards exploitation of musical workers is an underlying, assumed tension between the idea that performers are workers and that they are artists. The latter notion may stem from a “genius ideology” that originated in what we now think of as 19th century European classical music. There is no intrinsic need for such a tension; it has a function, though. As with academics, musicians who gain the understanding that they are artists as opposed to laborers might be prone to think that they are “special unicorns” for whom, say, organizing for better working conditions doesn’t accord with their self-image. Such a task is, perhaps, beneath them, or should not be a priority, or is someone else’s problem. In short, a pervasive underlying “artist vs. worker” ideology—as opposed to an “artist as worker” one—encourages musicians to view themselves as more or less isolated individuals who are implicitly in competition with each other. (14) Such competition can be fierce, and can lead musicians treating each other worse than external oppressors do. Some of the worst treatment of my career has come at the hands of other musicians, and I’m sure this is true of many musicians reading this.
US class tensions are really on display in many music performance spaces because music is so expensive to produce but rarely generates profit. In many cases, musicians might be overtly or subtly incentivized to identify with the economic class of the people who fund music performances even when the musicians themselves don’t belong to it. (15)
We should develop a culture where it is considered routine to share details of underpaid work with one another. Consider where in your life you can engage in action: boycott, divest, join an advocacy campaign, participate in mutual aid.
In this context, it is especially important for white cis-male musicians to attend to the challenges faced by their colleagues who do not possess white male privilege. If you are a white cis-male musician, listen carefully and take seriously concerns and experiences shared with you by your colleagues who are BIPOC and/or non-male. Don’t try to be a white savior. Do, however, know that your experience is not universal, and some of what just seems normal to you is actually very white-male-specific.
4. Think carefully and clearly about how you engage with systems or organizations that exploit musicians.
Why isn’t the title of this section something more direct and morally straightforward? Why not simply “Don’t engage with systems or organizations that exploit musicians?”
The answer is that, depending on how you think about it, every institution that employs musicians might be thought of as somehow exploitative. (16) This is related to the back-of-envelope math problem—if it’s hard to account for all of the labor that goes into a musical product, it’s also not possible to measure objectively how much exploitation is happening. Regardless, the continuum on which exploitation happens is extensive, and it requires a nuanced approach. Sometimes the exploitation is obvious and straightforward, sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s in-between. And there are many possible explanations for it. Sometimes it’s the result of a malicious actor who doesn’t respect musicians. Sometimes it’s the result of incompetence or ignorance on the part of an administrator. Sometimes it’s the result of good intentions that are poorly thought through. Sometimes the exploitation is coupled with psychological, physical, or sexual abuse. It can be hard to identify the cause and scope of exploitation when you’re faced with it or experiencing it. Regardless, one of the things that I regret most about my own career as a musician is the extent to which I haven’t spoken up when I’ve been exploited (17) or have encountered situations where it’s happened to others.
I’ve seen exploitative dynamics many times, and at all levels of the profession—from wedding gigs to major, large-budget arts organizations. Here’s an example: a number of years ago a very large-budget US arts institution offered a very small-budget arts organization I was involved with $300 to create an original work as an opener before one of its shows. That $300 was meant to cover the work of 7 musicians. (18)
Speaking up against exploitation may, on a personal level, be uncomfortable. It can seem socially unacceptable or personally/professionally risky to call it out when it’s happening. This is precisely because it has become so normalized, and so many musicians have internalized it as a norm. Let’s all consider what we can do to notice this when it happens and proactively denormalize it.
Let’s also be real here. Opportunities do arise that genuinely are both simultaneously beneficial to musicians and also under-funded. In a field as poorly funded as many musical ones are, it would be surprising if this were not the case. If you feels compelled to engage in such a situation, consider a clear cost-benefit analysis. Please be as sure as you can be that taking underpaid work is going to get you the benefit you think you’re getting.
I would be very surprised if musicians reading this piece don’t identify with these uncomfortable experiences and quandaries, which are among the most difficult we face. There is not a perfect response to every situation. We’ve all made choices we regret, and some that have worked out well for us. What I’m suggesting here is that we assess situations we face in a clear-eyed manner, support each other as we do so, and move the needle how we can.
5. Music teachers, coaches, bandleaders, conductors, etc. in educational settings must avoid reproducing the exploitative systems they may have experienced. The exploitative cultural logic of music professions thrives on this reproduction, and it’s crucial to disrupt it.
As we’ve discussed, there are powerful factors in musical professions that lead to exploitation and self-exploitation. Another is the very structure of the profession itself. There are vanishingly few full-time jobs in music that pay a living wage with benefits. Positions in major orchestras seem only to diminish in number with each passing year, and competition for those scarce positions only ever increases; in areas like jazz and vocal performance, full-time jobs are almost non-existent. In the areas where there is a relatively clear career path—music education, for example—this might not be considered primarily a music job by the employer, regardless of what musician’s motivation in pursuing it is. Given the extremely precarious nature of the labor market in musical fields, the incentives to find work are powerful, and social connections can take on an outsized importance. Musicians, especially young musicians, feel pressure to take underpaid gigs to gain “exposure,” to “get a foot in the door.” (To be fair, this practice is cynically viewed; a meme was widely shared a few years ago in which one interlocutor says “This is an unpaid gig, but it’ll be great exposure for you” while the other replies “Oh that’s perfect! My rent is actually 800 exposures!”)
This practice is sometimes supported by older musicians, who took similarly underpaid work in their youth and who view it as “paying your dues.” Sometimes such an attitude is accompanied by an assertion that nothing ever changes. You might hear phrases like “this is just the way the world works,” or “it’s just the way things are,” or “it is what it is.” This reification of an extremely contingent profession that works in an ephemeral artform only serves entrenched interests that gain from keeping some people down. (19)
The downstream impacts of these attitudes—”pay your dues, kid,” “it’s always been this way”—are stark. It normalizes self-exploitation in the minds of musicians. Self-exploitation takes many forms, but at its most fundamental is a willingness to take underpaid work, and perhaps to gaslight oneself about why one is doing it. In turn, it makes it more likely that musicians themselves might underpay their own musical collaborator when the time comes. Musical mentors should teach students in ways that will benefit the future of the profession. While this might involve being real with students and making sure that they are aware of the difficult nature of a life in music, it also must involve making them know that their actions matter, and that they have a choice to either reproduce harmful practices or actively work to change them.
6. Musicians should talk to non-musicians and music fans about the realities of musical labor.
We haven’t yet considered the basic posture of audience members in this equation. As Clara Takarabe has suggested, many audience members experience performances in their leisure time; they’re having fun and might project onto the musicians that they are also having fun. To audience members, music might come across as magical, ephemeral, and transcendent. It may seem effortless, and may provide much-needed relief from the difficulties or tedium of their own daily work. Musicians have all heard some version of the remark that “they make it look so easy,” and perhaps we even think this ourselves about performers we admire. An audience member may, therefore, not experience the performance as labor. It is true that musicians may be having fun when they perform (though many, maybe most, times they are not); it is also true that they understand themselves to be working very hard even when they are having fun.
Along the lines of “fun,” musicians inevitably hear at various points in their careers a commonplace from non-musicians about how musicians are “doing what they love for a living” or that they are “doing it for the love of music, not for the money,” etc. There are different versions of this sentiment, but all emphasize the fact that music is the vocation that musicians want to be doing. As indicated above, it may or may not be true that musicians want to be doing this work. Regardless, the function of this conventional wisdom is to devalue music as labor. That musicians love what they do is a commonplace that is easy to repeat and that subtly relieves the purveyor of any need to question a romanticized notion of musicians that they might hold. (20)
As a thought experiment, apply this logic to other professions. When one hires a lawyer or a roofer, one likely does not fantasize that the person is doing the job out of love for the rule of law or out of dedication to houses not having leaks (even if lawyers and roofers surely take professional pride in their work). You might think that this is an apples-to-oranges comparison, as conventional wisdom doesn’t necessarily expect lawyers and roofers to be “doing what they love” professionally. We could still choose other non-arts professions for this thought experiment for whom it is commonly understood that workers love their work. There is not a comparable discourse, for instance, that says that politicians, chefs, philosophy professors, or baseball pitchers (21) shouldn’t get paid.
To bring it really close to home: no one ever thinks to suggest that the people who audio/video record your gig, who tend the bar at your gig, from whom you rent percussion gear, who cater the post-performance reception, who staff the security desk at the venue, who clean the concert hall’s bathrooms, etc. aren’t entitled to compensation. (22)
7. People who employ or hire musicians must think in a nuanced and detailed manner about how much and for what those musicians are getting paid.
If you are an employer who has exploited musicians, you probably know on some level that you’ve done this. And you can do better in the future, but please be honest with yourself. People who employ musicians have all sorts of motivations, and there are many factors you have to consider; but it’s important not to lie to yourself.
If you’re someone who enjoys the feeling of having power over people for its own sake and finds satisfaction in exploiting musicians, well, you’re probably not reading this essay, and regardless I don’t have anything to say to you. If you’re someone who is well-intentioned but who regularly is involved in hiring musicians for less than they’re worth, confront that difficulty squarely. If you have budgetary limitations and pressure from your own superiors regarding how money is spent, make the choice that will not exploit the musicians, even if that means rethinking the scope of a project.
Another real life example: several years ago, a major large-budget university wanted to hire an organization I’m a member of to play student compositions. They declined to provide a number for artist fees, and delayed sending us a contract, despite repeated requests to do both. By the time we got the number—an extreme low-ball—it was too late for us realistically to withdraw from the engagement or threaten to. When we objected to the low-ball offer, the suggestion was made to cut rehearsal time, which would have had the effect of damaging the project for the student composers and causing my organization to present itself poorly. If the terms of the project had been known from the start, it’s much more likely that something satisfactory could have been worked out.
8. As a long-term project, we must work to change US political discourse regarding arts funding.
We probably share the sense that changing US political discourse surrounding arts funding is totally unrealistic, especially in the current national environment. Precisely the sense that it is unrealistic is the thing that keeps it from changing. However, we should also be upfront and clear-eyed about the challenges. The US economy is a massive neoliberal system that tends to subsume everything to market values and processes, whether it makes sense to do that or not. Music is certainly considered valuable in our society—it’s virtually ubiquitous—but the work musicians do often is not. Attitudes are entrenched and longstanding. We face an uphill battle. But a better world is possible.
While music is currently treated de facto as a commodity by economic relations in the US perhaps this treatment simply gets what music is wrong. The Culture As Care journal is onto something when it calls for art to be “produced as decommodified universal human rights, easily accessible to all,” even though at the present moment we are very far from that. (23)
I think there are crucial ontological and epistemological questions regarding music itself that impact how it is and should be valued. In short, just what is music anyway? And how do we know what it is? Would it make sense to treat music as what economists call a public good? As Theodor Adorno would suggest, is music’s greatest value that it is useless? (24) These philosophical and economic questions are significantly beyond the scope of this essay, but would all benefit from sustained discussion by musicians.
In the meantime, bold organizational and structural thinking is also needed. One example that occurs to me is the recently begun Golden Egg Chicago, a self-described "artist-led initiative strengthening the financial security of Chicago's freelance musicians." Along with information and resources about financial planning, Golden Egg gave "retirement matching grants to local musicians" in 2024.
I don’t offer any false hope or naive platitudes. However, I also believe that arts workers can change things for the better if we examine the situations we face with clarity, and act collectively.
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Footnotes:
(1) I write here about musicians specifically, mostly in the US context, because I am one and it is the professional field with which I am most familiar. Some of this analysis comes from my experience in spaces that are “classical music” adjacent, but I’m trying to keep it as broad as possible. Some aspects of this analysis can also likely be applied to other countries and to other fields of cultural work. For some fields, for example theater and movement/dance, there may be substantial parallels. Though it may be worse in some fields than others, this isn’t a race to the bottom and I don’t want to compare exploitation between fields of cultural work. I’m quite certain that we are all exploited.
(2) It’s important to acknowledge upfront that this piece only engages with the “capitalism” part of a triad that bell hooks repeatedly discusses throughout her career: the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Put differently, the exploitation referenced throughout this essay is surely always experienced intersectionally via race/ethnicity and gender, likely other factors as well. I chose to focus on the “capitalism” part because I felt that, as a cisgender white male, that is the place I could contribute most usefully and where my life experience is relevant.
(3) A common assumption might be that the marketplace, as it manifests between the musician and the person buying their labor power, determines the value of musical labor power.
(4) Real rates obviously vary wildly—truly wildly, you wouldn’t believe it—above and below that figure.
(5) OK, well, not never. There are of course major commercial pop stars whose concert tickets are thousands of dollars. This small group of commercially successful musical acts are not the subject of this essay. It may be more useful to think of them as capitalists rather than as workers, as John Pippen has argued.
(6) In addition, unions do many other things that aren’t directly related to compensation, including advocating for safe workplaces for arts workers. Again, we should all be grateful for this.
(7) Karl Marx, for instance, has a more specific definition of exploitation but I don’t think it’s necessary to get us started.
(8) This common understanding is clearly wrong or incomplete, but I don’t think that’s crucial for this part of the discussion. But to elaborate: anyone who has worked in non-profit arts organizations knows that ticket sales/covers never come close to paying for performances. Nevertheless, it seems to be a widely assumed underlying construction that a concert ticket or cover is a fee paid by the audience for a service (even if many of us explicitly know this to be fallacious). When you buy a concert ticket, you have a sense that you’re paying for the performance of the music. For instance, when a host at a show says some version of “all of the ticket sales go to the performers,” that’s a tacit engagement of this logic, say.
(9) Maybe there is something about what makes music enjoyable that incentivizes hiding this labor time; maybe our investment in making music seem magical and inspiring means that people don’t want to look under the hood.
(10) In different sorts of genres the performance-to-rehearsal-to-practice ratio varies considerably, though I would be surprised if the total time spent were much different.
(11) If you doubt whether education debt should be factored into a person’s wages, you might check out other disciplines. For instance, in the field of law—which of course has its own kind of expensive educational necessities—this question is the subject of considerable discussion. Here is just one example. More generally, evidence that education debt is factored into a person’s earning can be found ambiently all over US media discourse. As one of many examples, here is a Forbes article that lists “The 25 Colleges With The Worst Return On Investment.“ (Worth noting is that an art school is the one they list as the worst.)
(12) It’s worth stating explicitly that this set of expenses applies to the genres that are taught in higher education, which is obviously a small number, mostly related to classical music and jazz discourses.
(13) In the case of academic institutions or major symphony orchestras, the administrators are usually either the highest paid individuals or close to it. Perhaps the reason for this is that administrators are common in many other fields, thus mapping them on to the musical profession isn’t a conceptual leap.
(14) Jack Langdon and Eli Namay have already written about precisely this latter dynamic in Culture As Care here.
(15) Especially in classical music spaces, some musicians are very attached to the idea that classical music is something exceptionally special or something that really ought to be coded as upper-class. We desperately need to get over this delusion; it only serves to keep us oppressed. You can think that classical music is really great—as I do—without clinging to the notion that it’s better than everything else.
(16) Without getting into detail, this is the Marxian view.
(17) I did very underpaid work for a conductor for many years in the hopes that it would lead to something it didn’t. In retrospect, my decision to let myself be exploited and to self-exploit was obviously foolish; if nothing else, I’m glad I learned from that foolishness. I don’t want to center myself here, but I do want to attest personally to these dynamics.
(18) Note that I name neither organization. I am not doing so because I believe it would jeopardize aspects of my professional work. I hope it is clear that this is a real-time illustration of the problem.
(19) Not to mention that the notion that “nothing ever changes” is simply verifiably wrong, as even the most cursory examination of history—musical or otherwise—makes immediately clear.
(20) Along these lines, a lot of music is made in the context of organizations that are characterized by section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of the US as “nonprofit.” This term itself subtly suggests that, since the goal of the company is not profit, money matters less. The opposite is true, of course—the lack of a profit motive makes the need for money all the more acute.
(21) The comparison between musicians and athletes—two groups who use particular muscles in incredibly refined ways—is really fruitful one and would benefit from a sustained treatment.
(22) One area of US discourse that brings this point home is the wedding industry. There are scores of articles that nonchalantly normalize exploiting musicians, suggest ways of undercutting the market, and pit musicians against each other. For example this one, which has a number of ideas: “For starters, you can look to hire an amateur DJ who is just starting out. They are eager for the work and will often cut you a good deal.” “Hold auditions with young people who are trying to get some experience and let them come to you.” And “Place an ad in the paper or penny saver that you are looking for wedding bands or DJ’s and let them bid for the jobs. This will have the different players competing for your wedding which will have them all trying to outbid each other for the chance for exposure.”
(23) It’s important to note, also, that there are already plenty of spaces in which music is decommodified. Musicians regularly perform for each other and for friends in social gatherings, in small arts spaces, etc. There are flourishing communities of amateur musicians (often quite accomplished)—from small groups of friends to social networks to community orchestras—in the US who play regularly with each other for the joy of doing so. I admit that finding a dividing line between music as labor and music as an intimate way of enjoying sociality is difficult. Sometimes these two modes of musicianship even exist in the same space. Regardless, being a buzzkill about the flourishing decommodified music communities in the US is not something I want to do.
(24) As he says in Aesthetic Theory: “insofar as a social function can be predicted for artworks, it is their functionlessness.”