Overview

In Making Value, Timothy D. Taylor examines how people's conceptions of value inform and shape their production and consumption of music. Drawing on anthropological value theory, Taylor theorizes music's economic and noneconomic forms of value both ethnographically and historically. He covers the creation and exchange of value in a wide range of contexts: indie rock scenes, an Irish traditional music session, the work of music managers, how supply chains function to create various forms of value, how trendspotters seek out and create value, and how musical performances act as media of value. Taylor shows that to focus on value is to attend to what is meaningful to people as they move through their worlds. Ultimately, Taylor demonstrates that theorizing value aids us in moving beyond the music itself toward understanding how musicians, workers in the music business, and audiences struggle to make and maintain what they value.

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9781478030355

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Reviews

“Providing the first systematic account of music from the perspective of a theorization of value, Timothy D. Taylor draws on a deep knowledge of North American music industries, world musics, and independent music scenes to show how value accrues to musical commodities as they move between complex scenes of exchange. By centering a theorization of value, Making Value’s contribution lies in its offering of an alternative to critical thinking about music in contemporary capitalism deriving from studies of the culture industries and in Adornian critique.” -- Martin Stokes, King Edward Professor of Music, King’s College London “Examining how the capitalist processes of valorization, commodification, and accumulation interact with the social and cultural practices that produce and profit from musical performances and recordings, Making Value will prove enlightening to academics and students working across ethnomusicology and popular music studies as well as cultural, media, and communication studies. Its erudition, succinct chapters, discrete case studies, and familiar theoretical reference points make this important book highly teachable in the classroom.” -- Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory, University of East London

Author Information

Timothy D. Taylor is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production and Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, both also published by Duke University Press.

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