Economic Motives: Racism in the U.S. Music Industry During Cold War and Civil Rights Eras (Part 2/8)

The music industry, like any other industry, is driven by money. An artist's success is defined by their monetary value. Tough, but it is the reality. Continue reading to find out more about patterns of economic desire in the U.S. music industry.

Artwork: Robert S. Levy

The fundamental role of the music business during the Cold War and Civil rights movement was to transform cultural products into economic awards (Garofalo, 318). Even as a cultural industry, culture was never at the forefront; instead, the monetary value of those cultural products– diverse or not– became the dominant power of the business (Garofalo, 326). For example, the birth of Rock and Roll in the early 1950s demonstrated how a genre that was supposedly part of a radical movement became another commercial puppet in the music industry. Although Rock and Roll became politicized and identified with youth radical movements, it was nonetheless successful purely for its monetary value. Just as Michael Lydon stated in 1970, “Rock has been commercial in its very essence… [I]t was never an art form that just happened to make money, nor a commercial undertaking that sometimes became an art. Its art was synonymous with its business” (Garofalo, 337). Lydon’s statement emphasizes that the economic worth of culture or art was never just a coincidence; it became an art because it had monetary value. In the context of racism in the United States during the Cold War and Civil Rights eras, this put the American music industry in an unflattering light; based on the patterns of racism in the United States, one can infer that the range in cultural product resulted far more from its cost effectiveness and economic benefits than a commitment to cultural diversity (Garofalo, 326). The emphasis on money and the lack of deliberate commitment towards racial and cultural diversity in the music industry only deepened systemic racism within the industry and beyond.

Bibliography

Garofalo, Reebee. "From Music Publishing to MP3: Music and Industry in the Twentieth Century." American Music 17, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 318-54. Accessed May 6, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3052666.

#economics #musicindustry #coldwar #civilrights #monetaryvalue #RockandRoll