Dwight Macdonald once said that in order to sell-out you have to have something to sell, something that you have withheld from the market. In the first instance it is not a moral question but simply a question of the price of a commodity, or the very existence of a commodity; only later does any consideration of value or morality come into the contract.
Dylan certainly has something to sell. It is worth $300 million to someone, approximately $500,000 for every song he has ever written. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/arts/music/bob-dylan-sells-publishing.html What I wonder though is what all of these companies who are making a tear through sixty years of music buying? Beside the price of the commodity what is the value to the culture that they need? The deal is the latest and most high-profile in this year’s buzzing market for music catalogs, as artists both young and old have sold their songs, while publishers and investors have raised billions of dollars from both public and private sources to close those deals. Last week, Stevie Nicks <https://www.wsj.com/articles/stevie-nicks-sells-stake-in-songwriting-catalog-11607095635> sold a majority stake in her songwriting catalog for an estimated $80 million to Primary Wave Music, an independent publisher and marketing company. Hipgnosis Songs Fund, a British company that has made a rapid run in the market in just two and a half years, recently disclosed that it had spent about $670 million from March to September acquiring rights in more than 44,000 songs by Blondie, Rick James, Barry Manilow, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders and others. Anything that can be commodified will be commodified, is a basic rule of capitalism. Resistance to commodification of life and body has been the only limits so far. But commodification of intangibles usually has more to do with the possible ideological uses and cultural interpellations than with the actual money making possibilities of the “property” itself. It is like buying a piece of roadside real estate not to build a house or office but to put up a billboard. The property is leases to better sell something else. In some social reality, the real estate up for grabs is inside our skulls. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4230): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4230 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78777073/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
