Non-Industrial Music Business: Serving Social Minorities in Asia

Music events—concerts, festivals, recordings on CD, files shared online, or staged productions of traditionally informal music-making and ritual ceremonies—demand a broad socio-cultural analysis when examined from an industrial perspective. Across Asia, each community faces unique conditions for industrial growth in music. This discussion examines several Asian music practices that carry the label of ‘Intangible World Heritage’ and explores their current existence under an industrial development that deliberately conceals its industrial nature.

Most globally endangered music practices protected by UNESCO may qualify as ‘minority’ music, either ethnically or socially. One key question is whether these facets of music culture can realistically follow a market strategy, or whether such ‘items’ remain ideologically exempt from economic processing in the 21st century. Another issue involves moving beyond quantitative assessment in cultural economics and opening small-scale, high-quality markets—markets that do not need to hide their industrial background to attract audiences focused on cultural and ideological values rather than arbitrary mainstream demands. This paper also offers insight into the economic history of these local music practices and an outlook on how “non-industrial” business might support cultural development among social minorities in Asia.

Point of Departure: The Positive and Negative Attributes of the Music Industry

Theodor Adorno, reflecting on the early days of the global music economy in a manner typical of a mid-20th-century middle-income European thinker, spent considerable thought on the controversial music industry. Overwhelmed by the devastation of World War II, he once compared the helplessness of humankind to “…the behaviour of the prisoner who loves his cell because he has been left nothing else to love. The sacrifice of the individuality, which accommodates itself to the regularity of the successful, the doing of what everybody does, follows from the basic fact that in broad areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods. But the commercial necessity of concealing this identity leads to the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s pretence of individualism, which necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual.”

Adorno was a Eurocentric scholar who rarely opened his mind beyond a narrow viewpoint. Yet his observations apply substantially to the current situation in Asia. Producing an immense array of nominal choices that are easily recognizable across a particular, economically interesting segment of the music market does not necessarily create individuality in music production—often the opposite occurs. In most productions, avoiding risky sound combinations and sonic output that requires cultural familiarity leads to musical stereotyping and uniformity. This principle of prevention overrides, at nearly a 100% rate, the social claim for cultural identity of any music that does not fit the output scheme of transnational media companies such as Universal, Sony Corporation, EMI-Virgin, the Bertelsmann Group, and, to a certain extent, Warner. The economy of production and distribution values uniformity and stereotyping more highly than uniqueness and the ‘exotic’ complexity of sound created during varying performances for occasions other than predominant consumption.

Everybody’s Music Becomes Nobody’s Music

On the other hand, a range of cultural activities—music, dance, rituals, and other performances specific to an area’s local social practice—are regarded as highly relevant for the identity of a particular community, region, or even nation. These are the so-called Heritage Items. The market for these items is limited by their very character as an ethnic property of a group of people who claim uniqueness through them. Whether such items may become subject to commercial exploitation is frequently raised in various ways and rarely sufficiently answered. From the perspective of the music industry, these items may be less suitable for marketing and broad distribution due to their limiting cultural and intellectual communicable characteristics. Thus, narrow access to these heritage items in a preserved context requires a kind of transition into the mainstream.

Based on various academic and ethical discussions, one may realize that it is the process of mainstreaming that is viewed negatively, not marketing in general. Marketing has always been part of performing arts management, even as early as the 11th century. It relates to various degrees of treating commodities within a society and the sustainability of social systems in which marketing is practiced. The part considered not subject to marketing throughout history until the present—such as ritual chanting or singing in the shower—is excluded through its very practice. However, regional expansion of a market, the growing risk of marketing personalities and their performance products that become increasingly unrelated to the audience’s life, as well as legality and copyright laws regarding public media and consumer behavior, make marketing a reproachable business when it involves spiritual symbols of a community, region, or nation. By becoming music accessible to everybody through marketing, it alienates the values associated with these music practices from their cultural existence, thus turning into “nobody’s music.”

The Case of Ca Trù in Vietnam

The following example examines one such spiritual symbol: Vietnamese ca trù, recently registered on the list of Intangible World Heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. Over its eight-hundred-year history, ca trù has served various purposes. It functioned as a sound marker in ritual events at Daoist temples, was subject to competition in large village communities and at court, and eventually became sophisticated urban entertainment music among the learned. Recent changes are drastic for many reasons:

1. Local distinctiveness is replaced by an invented attractiveness aimed at high entertainment values—new participation patterns for audiences unfamiliar with the genre, lowered performance requirements, retelling stories about ca trù history that mistakenly assumed involvement with drugs and prostitution in the 20th century, and offering performances to tourists or researchers eager for a half-legal ambience that increases attention. ‘Musical enrichment’ comes through additional participating instruments such as drums, concussion sticks, cups, and alternating lutes.

In October 2009, the genre ca trù of the Viet people was listed as part of the World’s Intangible Heritage in need of urgent safeguarding, due to its uniqueness, its importance to the cultural identity of its bearers, and its alarming degree of disappearance.

2. Musical structures are rearranged to extend virtuosic sections of the pieces, while less technical and exciting sections—which require close familiarity with literature and musical aesthetics—are shortened.
3. Song text models are used in a purposefully archaic manner, even though the genre historically endured through actualization of song texts. Its most artful climax was reached when ca trù became a musical playground for avant-garde poets at the beginning of the 20th century.

Figure 1: The Thang Long Ca Tru Theatre adds 3 Tyba and a frame drum to the ensemble, which usually consists of only one long necked lute (dan day), a bamboo slab (phach), and a small cylindrical drum (trong chau). Performances offered to an audience of Vietnamese music lovers familiar with this type of music would most likely have different instrumentation.

These changes come along with a smoother sound image. When offered as an accurate tangible heritage item, a recording with a full, resonating, and echoing background would not have been the norm for a live event held in its usual setting—a rich family’s house, a section of a Daoist temple, or a traditional community house. All those places feature sound-absorbing furnishings. The distributed sound or video recording thus represents a performance practice idealized according to a supposedly risk-free mainstream appearance supported by the music industry.

Though the market segment for sensitive, spiritual music is quite small, it is a promising investment when a type of music suddenly becomes a World Heritage item. Marketing also targets an audience outside the community searching for exotic experiences—an audience diligently self-correcting its view regarding heritage and marketing strategies. Unfortunately, too much mainstreaming as accepted on an internal market does not sell well among those seeking the outstanding authenticity of world heritage items. The conflict between being molded into a “rounded thing”—a convenience suitable for everybody’s taste—and the demand for “sharp edges”—a singular identity marking uniqueness—makes the music industry less interested in these minor business difficulties. How can one market an item while obscuring the fact that it is being marketed?

Discussion: Changing Social Dynamics

While only a few young musicians previously active in popular music decide to play traditional music—often without deeper understanding—the cultural bearers see the way this music is integrated into the music industry as Westernization. This applies also to Western-educated tourists and researchers searching for authentic gems rather than glass pearls. When it is pointed out that a music event pretending to give real insight into ca trù may not be authentic, the answer is often that musicians representing the tradition cannot play as was done in the past for modern ears, for Western ears, or for ears that do not fully understand either the time or spatial dimension of an alien culture.

Following these arguments, some important questions are raised:

• Do the cultural bearers still understand the “past,” which includes changing social dynamics and varying circumstances or perspectives in art and performance production?
• What makes ears that are obviously different in nature so incompatible with the continuation of this supposed “past”?
• How should the production process adapt to these different ears?
• Why not create several performance products suitable for each audience?
• Why strive for a mass market using a minority product, thus eliminating one of its most unique features?

These questions imply that the ‘past’ becomes an item itself, reified through an imagined quality of a certain product. This leads to a re-layering of social structure among audiences. While markets grew slowly during the pre-digital era—and social and cultural minorities such as intellectuals, immigrants, elitist or precarious groups produced their music with limited dissemination in mind—social minorities now find themselves confronted with pressure to present their music as a type of cultural symbol for a fast-growing market. Anything can become fashion; any sound can become trendy; any behavior can become etiquette.

The problem in the search for reasonable dealing with the actual market lies in the way of production itself: it is the process that is the product and subject of marketing, rather than the fixed performance outcome that can be captured as a sound or video item.

Conclusion

Marketing should probably offer a variety of experience, not a competitively standardized “more is more” viewpoint. It would be better to follow the needs of the cultural bearers rather than the needs of a majority market, which can only be controlled through tangible items distributed in a way detached from the primary production process. Only in conjunction with a ‘process’ market—where the bearers of that culture, especially the musicians and their close connection to a specific minority group within a community, serve as a benchmark for evaluating authenticity and development—can a wider interested audience be reached. In other words, the stench of commerce can be removed by focusing on the suitable social layer and its primary needs.

In the past, success was measured by a growing number of items for sale—sound and audiovisual carriers—and a growing number of participants at events held in large auditoria or open-air staged concerts. Minority markets must now grow by serving the process of music-making on a small scale and by bridging the gap caused by alienation from a majority culture that appears abstract to Asian reality.

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