From recording performances to performing recordings. Recording technology and shifting ideologies of authorship in popular music.

Abstract

"The advent of recording technology at the turn of the 19th century contributed to a set of dramatic changes in the way popular music is produced and consumed. Since then, the record has stood in a crucial, ever-changing, relationship with its "other", performance. This relationship has never been a straightforward one: recording has never really been, either materially or ideologically, about the faithful reproduction of a live performance on a physical support. The distance - real or imagined - between the live performance and what can be found on the record has been a crucial point around which practices of music production and consumption - as well as notions of authorship - began to revolve since the emergence of the recording industry. In this article I examine the impact of recording technology on practices of production and consumption of popular music and I argue that recording technology, while contributing to the establishment of a Romantic notion of authorship in the popular music industry, has also promoted practices of production and consumption that undermine that very notion of authorship from both an aesthetic and an economic point of view. Ultimately, I suggest that a focus on the relationship between the recording and performance may prove useful in the analysis of authorship in mashup and other contemporary forms of production and consumption of music facilitated by the Internet and digital technologies."

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