Notes on Practices of Musical Exchange in Colombia

Abstract

Practices of musical exchange have been at the vanguard of the contemporary disjuncture between the nature of artistic objects, economic practices (or business models through which the trade of musical objects is enacted), and their legal status. Today the debate between the celebration of diversity and the anxieties of unequal exchange has increasingly moved to a legal terrain. At the economic level, this tension is often presented as a struggle between two opposing economic models. On the one hand, one would find open business practices, that is, those that rely upon an economy of sharing and, on the other, business practices that rely upon monetary remuneration in which every person doing intellectual work owns the “product” and by exercising “property” control they are able to obtain a profit that remunerates the individual effort. However, if we understand listening as “a historical relation of exchange” (Novak, 2008, p. 16) that has been crucial for the development of musical genres and ideas of creativity and production, then the moment of trade is not located solely at the site of consumption but also at that of creation and production of the musical work. In this paper we would like to explore the idea that paying attention to the practices of musical recording and production complicate this dual economic model. As such, struggles about musical recognition, labor, and circulation are not only struggles about the status of music as property but also about the way listening as a site of exchange is inscribed into productive and creative practices.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper is based on on-going fieldwork on practices of musical circulation and production in several cities in Colombia. This research has been made possible by support of IDRC/The Getúlio Vargas Foundation.

Notes

¹See Yudice (2007) for the way this opposition plays out in music.

²For example, see Drobnick (2004), Novak (2008), Ochoa (2006), Smith (2004), Sterne (2003), Stobart (2006), Vianna (2006), and Weidman (2006), among others.

³The roots of this phenomenon, however, can be traced to the rise of experimental urban musics in Colombia in the 1960s, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to deal with this history. See Ochoa and Botero (2007) for further elaboration.

⁴We have edited the MySpace translation of their self-presentation in English because of its many errors.

⁵ http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=129220085. Accessed on November 30, 2008. This description is exactly the one found in their former Web page in January 2007 (not related to MySpace), which can no longer be found.

⁶In Anarcho-punk bands in Colombia, only the first name is used.

⁷Derechos de autor (rights of author), in contrast to copyright, is described by Paul Goldstein, “[T]he European culture of copyright places authors in the center, giving them as a matter of natural right control over every use of their works that may affect their interest … By contrast, the American culture of copyrights centers on a hard, utilitarian calculus that balances the needs of copyright producers against the needs of copyright consumers, a calculus that leaves authors at the margins of its equation” (Goldstein, 2003, p. 138).

⁸As established by Article 52 of Decision 351 of 1993 of the Acuerdo de Cartagena.