Democratisation without democracy: Musical discourse in the digital age

For me as for many others, Jeffrey Goldfarb’s work in the sociology of culture has had its deepest resonance in affirming the place that the arts and sciences have in democratic public life – both in the expression of ideas or ideals with public relevance and as sites of conversation or contestation about the social world. This positioning of the arts in Goldfarb’s work is what drew me to his class when I was still working as Program Director for New Jazz at the Public in New York City. I wanted to think analytically about the possibilities of public, critical engagement in music because professional music criticism seemed to offer less and less in that regard. Theatre was his medium, music was mine, but our projects clearly overlapped and rested on shared commitments about the humanistic values and practices that engagement with the arts perhaps uniquely afford. Along the way, Goldfarb taught me to be careful about mapping politics onto culture and to appreciate the disjunctures and tensions that arise as a consequence of what he called culture’s ‘distinctiveness’. In the process, he introduced me to the terms in which I could formulate the questions I’ve been pursuing ever since (Hanrahan, 2013, 2018a, 2018b, 2019).

My most recent work explores what ‘democratisation’ means in critical discourse about music and digitalisation (Hanrahan, 2022). While democratisation is a central trope across scholarly, popular, and corporate writings and speech, I find that there is very little engagement in any of this discourse with the normative meanings of democracy. Instead, the democratisation discussed in scholarly work and popular culture amounts to what I call a democratisation without democracy. My thesis is that democracy in music is now conceived as a technological, rather than historical, achievement that is operationalised through technical protocols rather than through contestation and struggle. But understanding this shift as a direct result of technological change is clearly insufficient. Digital technologies emerged at a moment when other modes of critical discourse about music were waning and created a vacuum that IT executives could readily exploit. When a marketing director of Spotify can proudly announce: ‘We arrived to democratize music, and that’s what we’re doing’ (Acuña, 2013), something ‘democratic’ has clearly gone awry.

In contrast to the quiescence of the present, earlier periods of American history were marked by lively critical debate about music in the public domain. Professional music criticism has always functioned as an aesthetic discourse that can explain or analyse musical work and offer judgments of taste. Yet the historical record shows that music critics in the United States have often reflected the political thinking of their time, linking aesthetic concerns to issues of political and social democracy. For example, in mid-nineteenth century classical music commentary, democracy is invoked in response to the nation-building project. Does a particular musical style reflect the identity of an emergent democratic society? Does music listening serve to develop a shared morality within a highly individualistic culture? Is it sufficiently egalitarian, and how does that sensibility translate into music? In Tocquevillian style, much of this commentary was driven by the concern to establish and legitimate a new democratic music that was distinct in style and performance practice from that developed within the stricter status hierarchies of European societies. In fact, this new musical aesthetic was taking shape in an American vernacular in composition which often blended with popular song (Reynolds, 1995) as well as in performance practices – for instance, singing operatic repertoire in English (Levine, 1988).

Jazz writing provides another example. In the twentieth century postwar period, jazz was both a symbol of democratic freedom – in fact, jazz was deployed as Cold War propaganda through the State Department’s Jazz Ambassadors tours – and a site of struggle over the contradiction between that symbolism and the reality of a racially unjust society. The strong connection between some jazz musicians and the civil rights movement has been well documented (Hentoff, 2010; Monson, 2007; Porter, 2002, among others) and was a consistent topic of music commentary, including its critique of democracy in practice.

This kind of engaged writing continued into the 1970s and early 80s in the association of rock and folk music with counterculture and the New Left and continued, to an extent, with commentary on rap as a genre and lifestyle. But by the end of the 80s the normative link between music criticism and democracy seemed to run out of steam. Structural changes in the profession were surely a factor. Prior to this time, record companies largely depended on critics and radio announcers to promote the music on their lists, but now a great deal of that work shifted to in-house publicity and marketing departments. The sudden dominance of music television and the subsequent importance of music videos also became far more important as forms of publicity. All of which meant that the independent critic was far less influential.

A further strike against democracy as a normative critical category was that the late 80s and 90s saw cultural relativism as de rigeur, with critics reluctant even to call themselves experts. In interviews I conducted in 2009, for example, I found that critics were much more comfortable with the idea of the critic as a better-informed fan and were humbler in making claims about the broader social implications of music. When I asked Jon Pareles, then the pop music editor of the New York Times, if he thought there were still pressing social issues to write about, he replied: ‘less than there were back then … . I mean in the 80s it was like, hip-hop is going to ruin the youth in America and now one thinks about it. There’s less controversy. If you like it, fine, I don’t like it.’ Finally, many musicians chafed at the association of their music with politics or the understanding of it as politics, seeing in that association the denigration of their work as art. This is a tension that emerged first in the years following the Second World War in heated debates about the racial politics of jazz and the legitimation of Black music as art. The debunking of expert opinion that has come with digitalisation, where quantified measures of popularity are more often seen as reliable indicators of musical worth, has only further undermined critical commentary.

The contemporary narrative of democratisation came, then, to fill the emptied-out space of public debate about music. It relies on the network as both a technical platform and a metaphor and borrows from liberal notions of the public sphere. The power, and the seeming common sense, of the discourse is rooted in the confluence of its five key terms: first, the decentralisation of record companies and the loosening of their control over music production and distribution. Second, network disintermediation that affords direct and lateral relations between musicians and audiences capable of upending the traditional power of intermediaries such as Artist and Repertoire executives and music critics in determining what we hear. Third, digital networks also allow for what appear to be more normatively ‘democratic’ conditions of greater access, beyond music professionals and across social class distinctions, to music production technologies and music for consumption. As a consequence, and fourth, there are few barriers to participation, as technically anyone can create, produce, and disseminate music, blurring the boundary between amateurs and professionals. Finally, in this discourse networks allow for greater voice as anyone can comment, review, or rate music – it’s ‘the people’ who decide what’s good. Another aspect of voice is that, from a purely technical standpoint, anyone can have their music heard, or at least made available through digital technologies (Hanrahan, 2022).

But a democratisation discourse structured by these terms elides what is more clearly a set of contradictions. As Andrew Feenberg (2010) has argued, despite the rhetoric of democratisation, on the basis of criteria such as participation in decisions about technical design and the ends toward which technology is developed, the technical field is one of the least democratic in modern societies. And even on its own terms, the alleged ‘democratisation’ of the music world is a difficult claim to sustain. While the rise of user-generated content is indeed one consequence of the new media system, it is still the case that relatively few artists supply the bulk of the music that is actually downloaded or streamed. In fact, the old copyright and labour systems remain largely in place, and giant entertainment and IT corporations retain effective control over a multi-billion-dollar industry (Hesmondhalgh, 2019). Yet this discourse expresses a faith in digital technologies or platforms as inherently democratic in that they appear to be horizontally rather than hierarchically organised and operate on a binary of inclusion and exclusion wherein inclusion is an inherent good.

The seeming contradiction between increased access, participation and voice, and the persistence of corporate control over music can be understood through the distinction between inclusion in a network and inclusion as a democratic right or principle. In this regard, the formal similarities between technological platforms and democratic structures obscure what may be more significant substantive differences (Hanrahan, 2022). From a technical standpoint, power accumulates in networks to the extent that they expand, as long as this expansion can also exclude those elements, including persons, that do not add value (Prey, 2012). In other words, inclusion is not necessarily a democratic value but one that enhances the market dominance and social or political significance only of the network itself. What is more, the process of inclusion is enacted through network protocols rather than deliberative decision or on the basis of moral or ideological commitments. As Boltanski and Chiapello suggest, networks are in fact ethically ‘neutral’ in that

On the other hand, from a historical perspective, ‘inclusion’ has functioned as the basis of an ongoing critique of democracy in practice. But even here, while inclusion is a basic requirement for a just and democratic social and political order, it cannot ensure one.¹ As I learned from Goldfarb early on, in democratic practice, we must consider not just inclusion per se, but also the terms of inclusion – what it is those included are actually empowered to do. We must ask: How is inclusion articulated with power? With whom and in what contexts are those who are now included able to speak and act? While inclusion itself might be enlarged through technical means (the spread of literacy through mass production of books or journals, and through electronic voting systems come to mind), the terms of inclusion are not set through technical protocols but through contestation and moral decisions about justice, equality, the collective good, and our very humanity. In other words, democratic, as opposed to network, inclusion is not an operational parameter but contingent, situated, and principled (Hanrahan, 2022).

The substantive difference between democracy as a technical protocol and democracy as a historical achievement is perhaps most clearly seen through the transposition of meaning. In the lexicon of democratisation of music, equality is not grounded in the struggles of marginalised communities or the aspirations of an emergent democratic society but is rendered as the levelling of expertise. Much like corporate advertising, freedom is expressed as consumer choice, detached from any notions of collective renewal or processes of political contestation. Voice no longer refers to historical struggles over representation and recognition but is reduced to the number of streams on Spotify or views on YouTube. This reformulation of the meaning of terms so essential to plural democracies submerges democracy into technological rationality, collapsing the very distinctiveness of the domain of culture that Goldfarb has always so urgently defended.

As I have suggested elsewhere (Hanrahan, 2022), it is possible to trace the meanings of democracy in the US through public discourse about music as they shift in response to specific social projects and historical struggles. In the contemporary context, libertarian ideas of freedom compete with and often supplant democratic ones, with universalist conceptions of social justice or political democracy recast as impeding rather than furthering individualised notions of personal freedom and agency (cf., Brown, 2018). This is clearly reflected in the democratisation discourse about music, in which ‘cyberlibertarianism’ as individual empowerment is embodied and glorified in the heroic (and gendered) DIY figure.

So, what is it about it is about ‘democracy’ that should be invoked in conversations about music? Is it possible to dismantle the association of democratisation as a technical protocol from normative judgments about music as a site of deliberation across difference? It is difficult even to formulate, let alone answer, these questions in a cultural moment so different from earlier periods of American history in which discursive claims about music and democracy were clearly audible. In part, this is a consequence of the transformations of digital technologies and the structures of comment, consideration, review, and debate that they have quite thoroughly rewritten. But it has a lot to do with music making as well. While some individual musicians still connect their music to social issues and political contestation, they have not generated new forms of musical expression that have prompted widespread debate or criticism. Nor is the concentrated intensity of earlier periods, where these debates were woven through a whole genre of music and its critics, particularly evident.

What is more, recent political events have called democracy itself into question. Of course, legitimation crises are nothing new for democratic societies, as democratic notions of freedom or equality have always been paradoxical in practice, with the freedom for some conditioned by the unfreedom of others. But in the current climate, it also seems clear that, while necessary, democracy is insufficient to address or ameliorate pressing social needs for economic redistribution, ecological preservation, and social legitimation.

My aim here is not to provide a way forward but to offer a disclosive critique. This type of critical practice does not lead to broad pronouncements or generalised claims, much less predictive statements, but seeks to open a space for reflection on historical alternatives to what we see in the present. This, too, is something I learned from Jeff Goldfarb – that our work, like democracy, is messy and necessarily unfinished. But it is replenished in every act of critical engagement. That said, I do hope that music and its criticism might learn again to speak in normative democratic registers, such as those emerging from the movement for Black Lives, from the feminist strike, or from radical forms of environmental activism. That is, music critics might learn to speak of democracy not in the language of participation, access, and voice but of dignity, sustainability, and care.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).