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.