With Taylor Swift’s latest release, we now have a Spectacular case study of how technology, capitalism, and the music industry are converging to appropriate not just the profits, but also the productivities of the fan. With the new ticketing system, having money is not enough — one has to pay for it through time and labour! And in a thrilling and terrifying twist, the free labour which us music fans have innocently and willingly provided to express our love for music is at risk of becoming a little less innocent, and a bit more forced.
With the digital consumption of music, one’s love for music becomes digitized as well: Each share, stream, and purchase gets channeled into an algorithm that decides who is worthy and who is not. There is no other choice, as Swift claims: look what you made her do! At this point, I wouldn’t even be surprise if the merch prices are calculated to not just to reap maximum returns, but to yield optimum outrage for publicity.
In ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music’, Jacques Attali (1977) suggests that the field of music (and music itself as a cultural form) often foreshadows or mirrors the shifts in the dominant systems of production and consumption in society.`With the popularization and adoption of such systems (not just by Taylor Swift), there is a foreboding sense of how our daily lives are going to be further enframed and surveilled by technology. Our actions turned into data points, fed into algorithms that maximizes — no — that optimizes for the extraction and accumulation of capital in various forms.
