Conference explores intersection of music and money

Consider sitting through nine hours’ worth of nearly back-to-back lectures in a room lined by windows that flaunt, almost mockingly, blue skies and Saturday sunshine. What noble academic pursuit could possibly merit such an arduous task?

Attendees at the Columbia Music Scholarship Conference on Saturday—most of whom were either graduate students or Columbia music professors—decided that presentations about this year’s theme, “Music and Money: Examining Value in Music,” were worthy of such sacrifice. As Kate Heidemann, a music theory graduate student in attendance at the conference, said, “If it’s not your thing, it’s just not your thing.”

Paper topics were highly diverse and hardly confined to the relationship between contemporary music and the current economic climate, or to copyright infringement and downloading issues. In the first session, for example, a presentation about music publishing in Germany from 1500 to 1750 was followed by one about the Polish dance music genre “disco polo.” In another session, an account of the definitions of success by Christian hip-hop artists followed an analysis of the complex royalty issues that lie behind the usage of the classic American song “God Bless America.”

Keynoting the conference was Wayne Marshall, currently a Mellon Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is now writing a book on music, social media, and digital youth culture. Marshall is foremost an ethnomusicologist, but he’s also an avid blogger, teacher, and DJ who spins experimental music at a club in Cambridge, Mass. He described the genre of music he plays as a combination of hip-hop, reggae, jungle, and dubstep.

Marshall began his address, titled “Following the Musical Money Across the Social Web,” with a healthy dose of humor by showing YouTube videos—Soulja Boy’s now-famous instructional dance video for “Crank That Soulja Boy,” homemade reproductions of the dance, and a Winnie the Pooh parody. He used the videos to exemplify the usage of YouTube as a platform for the promulgation of shared public culture, as well as the website’s role as a means for self-promotion.

Marshall said a lot of the money made in social media is generated by musical practice. He argued that in today’s “participatory culture”—a neologism studied in depth by media scholar Henry Jenkins, in which the private citizen acts both as a consumer and a producer—the value of music can be monetized to a certain extent, but as a whole, it escapes any kind of concrete financial framework.

The stage for Marshall’s paper was set by two presentations. The first was given by Lauren Flood, an ethnomusicology student in GSAS, on an emerging trend in Brooklyn for the independent production of musical equipment. The other was given by Gavin Mueller, a Ph.D. student in cultural studies at George Mason University, on the growing corporate control of music distribution through music streaming services.

Speaker John Kmetz—who presented “250 Years of German Music and German Music Publishing (ca. 1500 to 1750): A Case for a Closed Market”—praised the conference for its intelligent organization of papers and the diversity of topics, which he said is “pretty unusual” compared to other similar conferences.

The conference was free and open to the public, and since the program was posted on the CMSC website, some people came only for specific presentations they wanted to see and left shortly afterward. The short coffee breaks between each presentation, casual atmosphere, and fully catered meals were welcome additions to the conference—even restless students might have found these features of the event good reasons to spend a beautiful Saturday indoors.