30 - Globalized new capitalism and the commodification of taste

Summary

This chapter considers the rise of globalization as a discourse about the present and how it has missed some of the underlying processes of the new capitalism with respect to cultural production. Scholars of the present have utilized a number of different frameworks in their theorizations, resulting in a proliferation of signs of all kinds, including those from non-Western elsewheres. Globalization is routinely offered as an explanation for something current, not as a historical condition, and it is treated as an agent of change rather than a particular facet of today's capitalism. The main effect that the globalization of capitalism has had on music is the fact that more music from the West's elsewheres has been arriving in the West's metropoles and entering into the commodity system and consumer economy of the new capitalism. The explosion of music in digital form has given rise to a new worker in the culture industries.