Brian Andreen Article Review 1: Capitalism and Romantic Ideology in the Record Buisness
In general in this article the author Jon Stratton argues thethat the requirement to assert the individual in the face of the anti-structural versus the structural, is informed by the cultural manifestation romanticism and is fundamentally affected by economic capitalism.
In essence the music industry often repetitively plays the same set of music and music over and over forming stereotypes through repetition. This repetition makes the music popular and thus increases that type of music’s marketability and makes it easier to sell, thus enhancing the capitalist practice in the music industry. At this same time if no Romanticism was used thus driving the new types of music to be formed the field would become stagnant and thus profits would decrease. For this reason Romanticism is necessary for the success of capitalism as it gives new types of music that are repeated making new stereotypes. Also this gives small companies the ability to make their own stereotypes and thus become very successful.
He also argues that people want to be individual in their music choice while also listening to what is popular. It is a key balance for things to be marketed in such a way that people get this impression. When people can listen to a music that is fun to listen to, popular, and lets them feel individual at the same time it is very successful.
This topic ties in very well to what we have done in class. The American dream is to be popular and have lots of things, while at the same time being able to be who you want to be and do whatever you want. This type of marketing and the formation of music popularity fits right into that American Dream especially during the 1940-1960 period. After this people started to become disenchanted with this idea and away from capitalism.
As we discussed in class the development of new technologies such as the radio and the television vastly increased the ability of marketers to set stereotypes with their marketing. This furthered the capitalistic drive for the use and production of music, while at the same time make it easer for the new music to become popular and set it’s own trends as it could spread and become established much faster. This easy spread of new ideas vastly increased the spread of new music and romanticism. This further spread of new ideas served to increase even further the capitalistic goals of music producers.