Publishing/Access/Mos Def

Admittedly, I rarely read books for fun during the semester (not to say that reading for school isn’t fun !), but I always love to read stuff on the good old Internet! Today I read an interesting article by Sheldon Pearce on Pitchfork that got me thinking about “publishing” in the music industry. Like book publishing, the way music is disseminated is changing all the time. For example, almost anyone can publish their dinky memoir on Amazon or their amateur pop song on SoundCloud. The market has become saturated with self-published, often mediocre content. But at the same time, access to creating and sharing art has never been broader. 

You can also listen to more music from more places than ever before, and for the low, low cost of free! This is good news for the listener, but streaming services like Spotify–with which you can listen to all the music you want without having to buy a record or an mp3 file or anything–have created their own set of problems within the music industry, from copyright disputes to the sad reality that smaller players who don’t sell out stadiums have a hard time making a living (much like the book world).

On the other hand, Sheldon Pearce’s article looks at Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def), whose first album in a decade is currently running as an installation at the Brooklyn Museum, rather than on Spotify or iTunes or any traditionally accessible mode of releasing music. Pearce called this ploy straight up pretentious, creating an “unnecessary barrier to entry.” While some argue that the trend of mixing hip hop with the art world is meant to “elevate” rap as an art form, Pearce noted that it aims to seek “validation from communities that have long deemed rap as lower class.”

Setting aside the social, cultural, and historical implications laden within Mos Def’s publication choice–what are the affordances of this kind of release, one bound by space and time? The listening experience is fully curated by the creator, who can choose to add non-musical elements to the encounter. In my mind, it’s like an expensive coffee table book. Refined, curated, even ornamental, and, of course, relatively expensive. But who are they for? Who gets to set those “barriers to entry?” And how do access and genre interplay with it comes to literary publishing?

To get a little meta for a second, I read this article for free on Pitchfork’s website. I love that I don’t have to pay a subscription to get access to a sea of content online from reputable and interesting magazines. The rub here is that the shift towards publications’ reliance on advertisements and click-rates rather than subscriptions have reshaped how writers write online. But I don’t mind wading through clickbait and being bombarded with malicious ads in order to hold on to MY precious dollar!