Free music and the revaluation of musical worth in online spaces

The immense volume of music now available at no cost online seems to produce oddly contradictory effects on how we understand musical value. On one side, music appears to depreciate when it can be copied endlessly at negligible expense — some argue it loses both economic value and, perhaps, affective worth. If rights holders stop receiving payment, less money flows into producing new work, and the resulting music becomes culturally and aesthetically poorer. Meanwhile, the argument goes, digital abundance makes personal listening shallow and disposable: there is simply too much material to absorb deeply. Consumers once saved for albums and studied them track by track; today they delete downloaded files that fail to grab their attention immediately.

Yet there is another perspective. Online distribution offers democratising possibilities: listeners are no longer tied to monopolistic content gatekeepers and can curate their own sonic environments — a move J. Attali (1985) might have welcomed. However, arguments from both sides tend to overlook how online contexts also enable musical production. Via MySpace, Facebook, netlabels, peer-to-peer networks, cracked software, and immense archives of source material, communities have built what could be called "deliberately" free music, as opposed to music that is merely "accidentally" free. Some niche subcultures — chiptune, nerdcore hip-hop, noise, speedcore — challenge at the level of practice both the market's economic calculations about music and the aesthetic values promoted by mainstream popular music.

This discussion focuses on one such genre: breakcore, a body of electronic music. In particular, it examines how producers repurpose samples of recently successful mainstream pop as those songs slide toward cultural datedness. Rather than celebrating "prosumers" or prophesying how music will change on the networked frontier, the aim is to describe aspects of free music as it stands. Several examples illustrate ideas of distinction, taste cultures, and musical value as they emerge in the practices of sampling and distribution, and in the interplay between them.

"Trash aesthetics" in breakcore have material foundations, traceable from the genre's early spread through peer-to-peer systems to its current widespread release on netlabels. Alongside sampling practices that routinely involve wholesale copyright infringement, these distribution features point toward a wider politics that treats popular music as pleasurable waste (Hamelman 2003). As Thompson observed, "value (aesthetic value) and price (economic value) are related, yet, equally clearly, they are not one and the same. Nor is it justifiable to assume that this relationship is fixed" (1979, p. 83). The position here is that breakcore musicians deliberately manipulate the slippage between these two kinds of value, producing subtle interventions in the musical sign economy while both leveraging and mocking different forms of cultural and subcultural capital.

Netlabel breakcore

Sizing up breakcore's popularity is tricky: the genre distributes largely for free, official sales figures are unreliable, and even if they existed they would likely mislead. While breakcore still appears on vinyl and CD (which then circulate more widely through peer-to-peer networks and direct-download blogs), the majority of releases now come from netlabels. Many of the more prolific netlabels use the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library with substantial audio holdings. Archive pages display download counts, providing a rough gauge of listenership. For example, VIP Rework — the 100th release from the Russian netlabel RusZUD — shows 11,688 downloads. For a niche genre, that audience seems respectable and surely larger than limited vinyl runs ever attracted.

Netlabels run on an unusual business logic; there is nothing for sale, not even as loss leaders. Occasionally one finds a PayPal tip option or Google Ads, but these are rare. Many netlabels announce events featuring their artists, though plenty do not, and the opportunity to buy merchandise such as a T-shirt is notably absent. Yet pure altruism or gifting does not tell the full story. These netlabels are embedded in a larger media ecology including links to artists' MySpace pages and broader "scenic institutions" (Kahn-Harris 2004, p. 99). The breakcore environment online constitutes both an attention economy and something resembling a community. Their operations echo a libertarian ethos resembling that of open-source software: apparently free labour generates prestige and status. Given the genre's sampling ethics and aesthetics, it is unsurprising (legally, politically, or ethically) that distribution follows suit. Some netlabels use Creative Commons licenses — ironic given their attitude toward others' copyrights — but many show no interest in marking their works with any legal tag.

In classic economic (or "catallactic") terms (Polanyi 1971, p. 257), one might argue that netlabels simply disseminate music nobody would purchase. That reading implies the music is worthless, formally bad, technically poor — a vanity press for material that a meritocratic (Darwinian) market would reject. The "real world" is where CDs line shelves and culture carries price tags, and in that world netlabel music would vanish because it lacks profitability. This neat equation of aesthetics and economics underpins monopoly distribution and appears in anti-piracy rhetoric: "asserting that music should be free is the same as saying it has no value – that music is worthless. It's not"(Music Industry Piracy Investigations 2010). The problem goes beyond ill will or the unwise suggestion that free music lacks worth. Plenty of free things have immense value — air, for instance, remains free while staying fundamentally valuable. In some views, items are worth only what we pay, making pricier things automatically superior — a logic sometimes applied to healthcare and education. Music is not a natural resource demanding free access, nor does "information wants to be free" settle anything. The real difficulty is the deliberate underspecification of "value," allowing economic and aesthetic meanings to blur. This semantic predicament (Abend 2008) benefits political agendas. William Brooks advised a "tasteless scholarship," free from entangled notions of musicological or aesthetic quality (1982, p. 13).

Sampling and valorising detritus

Netlabel breakcore — especially through sampling — can be seen as deliberately working against the view that free items are cheap. The genre reconfigures "mainstream" and canonical pop, revealing attitudes toward dated cultural material. A lineup from 2009 shows the approach: Non Human's "Trip" on War Nah Done, Alex Tune's two versions of "Ass of Bass" on VIP Rework and What is a Mashup?, Zombie's "Tysh Nie MashaPasha" on Grave Rave, Negrobeat's "How about a Kiss?" on Damn Skippy, and Buttress O'Kneel's "Paraplegic Android (part 1)" on Mash-Up Your Ass. Observers sometimes dub this sort of work "mashcore."

These pieces are stitched together from samples so as to perform "a long list of discarded cultural references that, having been forgotten or hurled into the dumpsite of memory, have become the equivalent of symbolic garbage" (Negrón-Muntaner 2009, p. 333). The claim turns on how popular culture's rapid turnover registers in breakcore. By skilled arrangement of sample cotext and context, producers make them name their exact spot on the slope toward cultural irrelevance. Zombie's tracks in particular suggest Frankenstein's monster: the "mad doctor" operates behind the scenes, yet the producer also "speaks" ventriloquially through relatively recent pop music. Hearing Zombie flags the contingent cultural worth of each sample, an evaluation tied to contemporaneity and "coolness."

Breakcore producers target music that has only just become uncool or slipped into mild tackiness. Take Ace of Base's "All That She Wants" — a song now relegated to supermarket playlists. Alex Tune's decision to issue both a "cover" and a "mashup" arguably exploits rather than ignores that status. Such moves are sometimes described as détournement: "the use of appropriated materials in ways that alter their original meaning" (Collins 2005, p. 169). But "original meaning" is inherently unstable: it shifts even as the sample is made, depending on context. Breakcore producers play in a reverse-economy of prestige, repurposing cultural waste with a wink. The activity also operates heteroglossically — a double-voiced ironic distancing that simultaneously acknowledges and disavows the source text and the act of crafting with it. the product becomes "merely humorous" as producers consistently erase their own labour by sticking to well-worn signifying antics.

Capital depreciation and shifting worth

Is there any way to claim definitively that a specific pop song has turned cliché or been officially declared "naff"? Not easily: listeners differ, but the process remains real. Michael Jackson's "Beat It" illustrates how some think the song is cheesy while others do not. Since his death, critical reassessment has rolled in. Popular music perpetually cycles: current favorites can later be overplayed clichés before they crawl back into smaller or more committed listening circuits. As Frow states: "value is an effect of the circulation of objects between regimes of value, a circulation which may be, but is not necessarily, driven either by wastefulness, the transformation of valuable matter into waste, or by the reverse process ... whereby a zero degree of worth generates new and unexpected structures of value which then modify the rules of the game of distinction. This circulation is always excessive to the singular market supposed by any reduction of use value to intrinsic properties" (2003, p. 35). People could agree about "Beat It" but still argue over Black Lace's "Agadoo". Much of the pleasure in breakcore's plunderphonics arises when a sample rescued from the dregs of cheesiness is deployed with clever skill. The act of reading a sample — or of a set with one in mind — performs a negotiation of its worth; the music projects an imagined listener, real listeners respond, and public value eventually settles.

A hazard in reading samples so intently is projecting one's own taste position onto others. How to separate a producer's deliberate use of cheese from a listener's mistaken perception that the sample is therefor corny? Engaging culture always also exposes the interpreter: "culture classifies and, in doing so, classifies the classifier" (Savage and Bennett 2005, p. 4).

Breakcore as ideological riff

This entire mode of musical production and distribution — tied to networked computers — cannot be treated as coincidence. Resemblances hold between the genre's trash aesthetics (sampling popular waste) and its distribution via netlabels (free dissemination). Whether intentional or not, releasing free music derived from borrowed samples reiterates an old model of cultural value: economic sign and symbolic weight merge loosely. Breakcore neatly fits the framework Hebdige (1979) outlined, where a subculture magically resolves social contradictions through appropriation and bricolage. It subverts a capitalist premise that commodities are worth precisely what they cost — so things provided at zero cost must be zero value. netlabel breakcore plays on this premise: offfering music freely to those connected, yet devoting enormous aesthetic energy to waste, to sign-play within pop history, and to marking how ephemeral mass hits become over an accelerating cycle.