The production of success: an anti-musicology of the pop song

Abstract

At the heart of the frenetic activity of the record industry and of all the conflicting opinion to which this activity gives rise, lies a common goal: popular success. This also provides the key to the paradoxes one encounters when one studies the economic aspects of the record industry in France.†What does the achievement of success involve in actual fact? Economic, sociological and musicological analyses tend to evade this issue rather than explain it. Can the ability to achieve success be attributed to a more or less innate sixth sense? Does it reside in the superiority of the smaller producers over the larger ones? Is success achieved through bribery, through massive ‘plugging’, through a dulling of the senses or through conformism, as the ritual claims of the press would have it? Is it a by-product of profit, of standardisation, of alienation or of the prevailing ideology, as marxists argue? The sociology of mass media and culture explains it in an equally wide variety of ways – in terms of manipulation (see Adorno 1941), the meaninglessness of mass culture (see Ellul 1980, Hoggart 1957)/ symbolic exclusion (see Bourdieu 1979), the system of fashion (see Barthes 1967), desocialised ritual (see Baudrillard 1970), or as the cunning strategies of the dominated (see de Certeau 1974). I do not propose casually to invoke all the different theories only to dismiss them with moralistic claims that we must return to the basic facts.

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