Audiences Authoring Authors: Audience Production of Value, the Culture Industry, and Copyright more

The International Journal the ARTS in SOcieTy Volume 2, Number 1 Audiences Authoring Authors: Audience Production of Value, the Culture Industry, and Copyright Tim MacNeill www.arts-journal.com THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY http://www.arts-journal.com First published in 2007 in Melbourne, Australia by Common Ground Publishing Pty Ltd www.CommonGroundPublishing.com. © 2007 (individual papers), the author(s) © 2007 (selection and editorial matter) Common Ground Authors are responsible for the accuracy of citations, quotations, diagrams, tables and maps. All rights reserved. Apart from fair use for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act (Australia), no part of this work may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. For permissions and other inquiries, please contact <cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com>. ISSN: 1833-1866 Publisher Site: http://www.Arts-Journal.com THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY is a peer refereed journal. Full papers submitted for publication are refereed by Associate Editors through anonymous referee processes. Typeset in Common Ground Markup Language using CGCreator multichannel typesetting system http://www.CommonGroundSoftware.com. Audiences Authoring Authors: Audience Production of Value, the Culture Industry, and Copyright Tim MacNeill, York University, Ontario, Canada Abstract: Western enlightenment thinking regarding the authorship of symbolic texts posits a singular author as the sole producer of the cultural value attributed to these texts. Refuters of this claim have generally argued that cultural value is in fact created in a number of cites within a complex production process – not in a singular being. While sustaining a rejection the author myth, I show that there is in fact a singular (albeit amorphous and widely dispersed) site in which the production of cultural value occurs. All cultural value, I argue, is created by audiences – nebulous agglomerations of social actors who create meaning through interactive consumption. My argument is that the significance attached to any ‘cultural product’ is incidental. It is a byproduct of the consumption of the good that the audience is actually seeking to consume: itself. Toward making this point, I present a theoretical discussion of the way in which audiences produce cultural value. I then present supporting empirical evidence undertaken by myself and others. Finally I discuss the implications of an audience production thesis for the analysis of intellectual property institutions and the culture industry in general. Keywords: Culture Industry, Audience Reception, Music Market, Political Economy, Cultural Studies “It’s not the band I hate. It’s their fans.” Sloan, from “Coax Me,” 1994 W ESTERN ENLIGHTENMENT THINKING regarding the authorship of symbolic texts1 posits a singular author as the sole producer of the cultural value attributed to these texts (Frith, 2004). This myth of the romantic creative genius has been embodied in increasingly expansive laws regarding ownership in symbolic resources such as musical compositions, brand names, logos, films, literature, and celebrity personas (Lessig, 2004; Drahos, 1995; Coombe, 1998; Coombe & Herman, 2001). The establishment of such rights of ownership, in turn, permits the existence of cultural industries as we know them (Throsby, 2001). The traditional conception of the author on which these conventions are based has been convincingly problematized by many authors. Coombe (1998), Lessig (2004), Drahos (1995), Grossberg (1992), and Lewis (1992) for example, claim that instead of being sourced from a single author, cultural value is created in a variety of sites throughout complex production processes. My intent here is to augment this critique. While sustaining a rejection of the author myth, I wish to show that there is in fact a singular (albeit amorphous and widely dispersed) site in which the production of cultural value occurs. All cultural value, I will argue, is created by audiences – nebu1 lous agglomerations of social actors who create meaning through interactive consumption. My argument is that the significance attached to any ‘cultural product’ is incidental. It is a byproduct of the consumption of the good that the audience is actually seeking to consume: itself. Toward arguing this, I will present a theoretical discussion of the way in which audiences produce cultural value. I will then present supporting empirical evidence undertaken by myself and others. Finally I will discuss the implications of an audience production thesis for the analysis of intellectual property institutions and the culture industry in general. Audience Production of Cultural Value – Theoretical Framework At the outset of this section I must first define precisely what I mean by cultural value. For my purposes, the term will simply refer to the fact that a particular text has become useful for social actors within a cultural milieu. In order to be of value, however, a cultural text must be endowed with some sort of meaning. One type of meaning, which I will call associational meaning, consists of a message regarding group membership. Listening to the Sex Pistols signifies that I am a punk, for example. Simultaneously, a text may be endowed with what I will call interpretive meaning. Sure, I may be recognizable as a punk – but what does it mean to be a punk? Similarly, what does a particular punk song mean? I use the term “text” to refer to any encoded cultural or symbolic object. In other words, a text is something that is meant to communicate meaning. A text might be a song, novel, brand-name, personae or other symbolic construction. THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY, VOLUME 2, NUMBER 1, 2007 http://www.arts-journal.com, ISSN 1833-1866 © Common Ground, Tim MacNeill, All Rights Reserved, Permissions: cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com 44 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY, VOLUME 2 I am not directly concerned with interpretive meaning here, although it is obviously practically inseparable from the associational form. For my argument, it does not matter what particular meanings actors take from texts other than that they signal group membership and provide resources for social interaction. Cultural theory such as that of Stuart Hall (2001) as well as the communications theory of Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) has some use here despite its largely interpretive focus. Both of these traditions break with the top-down control model of culture of the Frankfurt school to assume the agency of receivers in controlling meaning. As Lull (1992) describes regarding the transmission of musical texts, receivers “act wittingly and imaginatively” – in other words creatively – while they “are influenced by social circumstances” (14). Furthermore, although a communication of meaning occurs between musician and audience member, “the social dimensions of music listening are ever more abundant” (19). These claims regarding the abundance of socially produced meaning and the agency of the receiver of the message will be maintained throughout this argument. Moving from interpretive to associational meanings involves engagement with the question of why certain texts become culturally valuable. For Lewis (1992) the answer is purely social. Key to his argument is the assertion that “music is an ordered system of meaning and a set of symbols for participation in social interaction” (135). As a result, “[t]he central fact is that we pretty much listen to, and enjoy, the same music that is listened to by other people we like or with whom we identify” (137, italics original). Knowledge about particular music is both a “cultural knowledge that has deep social implications” and a “conversational resource” (6). I would like to make more precise claims by insisting that this knowledge has signifying uses and acts as an interactional resource. As an interactional resource, cultural goods might act as signal fires – transmitting information regarding where sociality will occur and around which symbols it will occur. The key idea here is that the text exists to facilitate social interaction because social interaction is a desirable end in itself (Fiske, 1987, pp. 77-78; Frank & Cook, 1995, pp. 191-192). Signifying uses, on the other hand, are a more complicated affair. In this conception, the social implications of musical texts lie in the group affiliations that they suggest. Texts, in other words, are useful as signifiers of identity. However, as Bourdieu (1985) implies, artistic texts are empty signifiers before audiences create meaning for them as they consecrate them as status or membership signifying objects. Renckstorf et al. (1996) concur – depicting artistic texts as background objects that are not valued until put to use by socially situated actors. Fiske (1992) furthers our understanding by drawing on Bourdieu (1984) in claiming that cultural value is actually built on to these background objects / empty signifiers by productive audiences. Using the raw materials provided by authors, people engage in three types of production according to Fiske, all of which contribute to the cultural value of the good. The first and most obvious of these is textual production. Fans produce texts such as zines, websites, and blogs which serve as non-paid advertising for the cultural product in question. The second form is semiotic production, which “consists of the making of meanings of social identity and of social experience from the semiotic resources of the cultural commodity” (37). This is an ‘interior’ process in which an individual brings their entire stock of cultural knowledge to bear on the object of their attention. This cultural knowledge is itself produced within processes of enunciative production. This occurs “when the meanings made are spoken and are shared within a face-to-face or oral culture,” and also when social identities are produced and maintained through the “styling of hair or make-up, the choice of clothes or accessories” (ibid). For Fiske (1992), Bourdieu (1998), Renckstorf (1996), Coombe (1998), Coombe & Herman (2001), and Dolfsma (2004), such productive and performative communication serves to actively build meaning onto particular artefacts as a means of demarcating the boundaries of belonging to a particular cultural community. Once the meaning is built onto an object through this process of signification, the acquisition of the good becomes a signal of group membership and a signifier of identity – the product has become culturally valuable because it has been made meaningful by an audience. As Bourdieu (1984; 1985) and others have suggested (Kauffman, 2004; Hebdige, 1979), however, this value is unstable since it can be threatened by the very popularity of the text itself. When individuals gain a sense of identity from affinity to a particular group, mass appeal of the text on which that group is based tends to erode the distinction accorded through the use of the good. Some individuals, or first movers, will initiate the process of consecrating a new stochastically selected empty signifier from a cultural environment littered with such underutilized texts. Others will follow once the status and/or identity-bearing quality of the text has been established. Because of this dynamic tendency for “endogenous cultural change,” all audience produced value is unstable and is quickly (although never completely) depleted (Kaufman, 2004, pp. 346-352). This dynamic movement in signification activities may be expected to be more common in environments where a large number of empty signifiers are available. TIM MACNEILL 45 We have, then, two overarching ways in which audiences may attribute value to a cultural text. They may choose to use it as a resource that facilitates interaction. Here the cultural value exists not intrinsically in the text but rather in the knowledge that other people are also using it. It also may be used as a signifier of identity. Again, the value is not intrinsic in the text; rather it is produced through a complex social consecration process. In both these cases, the ultimate good being consumed by the audience is the audience itself. The text is attributed cultural value through coincidental association with this process. Its value does not exist before audiences produce it. This implies that multimillion dollar movies, sound recordings, and would-be superstars are devoid of cultural value until they have been subjected to this further productive process – it is where all cultural value is produced. Finding the Factory – Empirical Work on Audience Production The previous section culminated in a strong claim. The assertion that audiences produce value in symbolic goods is not devoid of empirical substantiation however. Coombe (1998) and Coombe & Herman (2001) explore the cooption of pop icons by gay, lesbian and other subcultures, as well as the usurpation of meanings attached to logos and trade marks, emphasizing the resultant emergence of new cultural value spurred by these processes. Jenkins (2006a; 2006b) shows the ways in which popular texts such as Star Wars, American Idol, Survivor, The Simms, Harry Potter, and others are acted upon by a creative audience to produce a “buzz that is increasingly valued by the media industry” (2006b, p. 4). Grossberg (1992) finds similarly productive audiences in his examination of the rise of the celebrity personae of Bruce Springsteen. Lewis (1992) addresses the formation of musical taste in general, finding audience created value in multiple geographical and temporal contexts. Renckstorf et al. (1996) have similar findings regarding the sociality of television viewing. Dolfsma (2004) attributes the rise of pop music in Europe largely to audience production. Wipperfürth (2005) and Cova & Cova (2002) discuss the “hijacking” of brand identities such as Doc Martins, Soloman and Napster by creative audiences and the economic windfalls that have ensued. There is consensus amongst the authors of these works regarding three points. First, they all assert that the typical author figure is not the sole producer of culturally valuable texts. Second, they agree that cultural value is in fact produced in a number of locations – for example the press, the recording studio, the music industry accountant, the manager, the 2 celebrity themselves, and largely the audience. Third, drawing on Benjamin (1969) it is either explicitly or implicitly claimed that audience productivity is a response to the conditions imposed by an era of mechanical (re)production of artistic texts. Alienated from the process of production and the aura that is projected and controlled by the author, the argument goes, consumers fetishize the mass produced object – attributing to it an improvised cultural quality that would not have existed had they not been distanced from the production process by the advent of the machine. This implies that audience creativity is a symptom of industrialized mass culture. My experience and empirical work in a market for local music leads me to maintain the first of the above assertions but reject the second and third. It is to this personal historiography and subsequent qualitative research that I turn now. In 1997 I had begun an undergraduate degree after quitting a tenuous career as a recording artist on the East coast of Canada2. I had over the previous few years produced two recordings as the songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist for an independent rock band called Vertigo that was made up of an experienced and talented rhythm section and myself. Despite critically acclaimed recordings, we had not managed to sell more than five hundred compact discs primarily within a network that extended through direct connections with immediate friends and family. We all had maintained part time jobs to sustain ourselves financially. Shortly after the beginning of my first undergraduate year, I met two individuals, a drummer and a bass player, and we began to play music together. We called ourselves Arlibido. My new band mates were less refined and experienced musicians than those I was accustomed to playing with. They were both just out of high school. Importantly, although we were attending university in Halifax, the capital of the province of Nova Scotia, these individuals both had strong family and community ties to Inverness, a very small town of about 1000 people on Cape Breton Island. Inverness is located about five hundred kilometres from Halifax – the central hub for the East coast music industry and the city in which Arlibido was based. Within a year, we had released a new CD, containing some new material and some that I had written for the last band. A friend and I produced the CD for $1000 Canadian dollars. The recording quality was sufficient for limited airplay, but not as high as we might have wanted. Nonetheless, within six months that recording was swept in a whirlwind of popularity that placed us at the top of the East coast independent rock music scene. We went from audiences of about thirty friends per show to packing clubs on our own The East coast region consists of four provinces with a combined 2001 population of about 2.5 million (Statistics Canada, 2005). 46 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY, VOLUME 2 and sharing stages with world class acts in front of tens of thousands of people. CD sales were sufficient to keep that album at the #1 spot on East coast independent sales charts for over a year. Although I had written all the music and lyrics for the project, as well as “fronted” the band and played the guitars, I had a recurrent feeling that the band’s emergent cultural value had little to do with me. Our popularity was contingent on textual and enunciative production on the part of our audience. This audience was formed around the close personal connections of my band-mates to the town of Inverness and the Cape Breton region in general. Although I had never been to Inverness, we were immediately dubbed an Inverness band. The house parties we played in the early days in Halifax the near exclusive domain of an Inverness diaspora of which my band-mates were a part. Our songs became theme songs for this group and then an increasing number of the people from the town. The townspeople volunteered to promote the band and sell materials in various ways in Halifax, Cape Breton, and the rest of the East coast. The small Inverness newspaper, the entertainment editor of which was a family acquaintance of my band-mates, began running stories about us. The identity of a town was being wrapped around our little rock band. I felt that I had become an honorary Invernesser. When we played the clubs in Halifax, the crowd was initially made up of about 30 Invernessers. Soon sundry Cape Bretoners (primarily from the West coast towns near Inverness) were added. As we transcended the single town affiliation and became a Cape Breton band, our shows in Halifax became larger – perhaps about 80 people. But they were an extremely energetic crowd. Indeed, a bar manager told me later that he knew the band was going to “explode” the first time he saw that small crowd and their vigour. It infected anyone who entered the bar. It also extended onto the streets and found its way into conversation all over town. Soon every Invernesser in Halifax, and most Cape Bretoners, knew where to find one another – at Arlibido shows. Our music was facilitating community interaction. Other Halagonians (the proper name for people living in Halifax), particularly those who were regulars in the local independent music scene, saw this buzz and caught it. Very quickly we became a Halifax band, and the 80 excited Cape Bretoners that were regulars at shows, and whom I had come to know personally, became buried in hundreds of faces that I no longer recognized. These anonymous faces were screaming my song lyrics back at me at every show with the same energy that was originally displayed by the Cape Bretoners. There were two or three fan websites that had autonomously appeared in addition to the bands official site. Our touring schedule became so demanding that we all dropped out of university. Finally at this point, the music industry and official press caught on. They were too late to add much to the hype however. They just documented it and made money from it as best they could. In 2001, in our acceptance speech for winning “Alternative Artist of the Year” at the East Coast Music Awards, I thanked my parents, my girlfriend, and the town of Inverness. The relatively cohesive and highly productive fan community would not last forever however. The band had been “written” by its audience as an East Coast regional symbol, a Nova Scotian symbol, a Halagonian symbol, a Cape Bretoner symbol, and an Invernesser symbol. It had also been a locus of identity for those who thought of themselves as underground alternative rock connoisseurs. In 2001, about the time we released our second CD (budget $25,000 this time) we undertook a tour that I have been later told by many in the industry was our biggest mistake. We did an eight day supporting gig for a band called Serial Joe, who had the number one single in Canada at the time. Although they were quite a “heavy” rock band and accomplished musicians, they were also all in their teens. So were their fans. The tour was highly successful. Suddenly there were over ten fan websites and we were receiving in excess of fifty fan emails per day. A rift appeared on our official site’s discussion board between “old” and “new” fans, however. The former attacked the latter with such ferocity that our site administrator had to delete many unsavoury correspondences. From that moment on, all the band members felt a distinct loss of street-level legitimacy. The feeling seemed to be in the air breathed by Halifax indie hipsters that we had been co-opted – we had sold out. Although we had gained many new fans from this tour and others like it, had high-level management and record label affiliations, nearly $100,000 of tour support, recording, and video budget funds, had our music played more on mainstream radio, had a national television show aired about us, been featured on the soundtrack of a top US television show (Dawson’s Creek) among other things, the second CD sold the same number of copies as had the first. The quick gain of new fans, it seemed, had been accomplished at the expense of losing others. The band members ourselves began to internalize this feeling of illegitimacy. We began to react with contempt toward the teenage fans, insulting them often in our personal conversations. We revolted against the attack on our identity by first turning ourselves into a “jam band” – thus downplaying any discernable catchy pop hooks in the songs – and then finally breaking up. TIM MACNEILL 47 Later (2005), while doing graduate work in economics, I conducted multiple interviews with musicians and industry professionals with specific focus on the way in which the audiences had produced value for them in the past. I interviewed ten individuals regarding their professional histories and particularly their relationships with audiences. The Participants had combined experience in the release of over 70 different recordings by over 30 artists who had sales that ranged from 500 copies to over 400,000 per release. Although I do not have space to discuss these data in detail, it is important to relate that the experiences of these individuals corresponded greatly with the themes expressed in the personal account above. Fan-bases were commonly described as “cults” or “communities” that existed as much to socialize internally than to relate with the band. The communities engaged in textual and enunciative production just as is evident in my account. All artists that experienced increases in sales experienced a simultaneous increase in communicative interaction within their audiences. Musical consumption was not typified as simply a relationship between an artist and single audience members; it was just as importantly articulated as a relationship amongst audience members. In other words, audience members were consuming each other as they consumed the artistic texts. This action was consistently described as the most crucial contributor to success. Importantly, however, none of the interviewees knew how to predict or control the creative impulses of audiences. Even the most experienced managers admitted that they had no idea why some artists or texts become successful and others do not. The difference between a release that sold nearly zero units – exhibiting no cultural or economic value – and those that were highly successful seemed to have little to do with the actions of artist or the outlay of funds in the form of production and advertising budgets, as was also the case in my historiography. This is consistent with statistics in the industry in general, where even the largest multinationals utilizing immense advertising budgets manage to achieve profits on only ten percent of releases (RIAA, 2004). To claim as I have that interactive audience activity correlates strongly with increased popularity does not necessarily show that the latter was caused by the former, however. Interactive audience behaviour may be simply a side-effect of aggregated individual consumption choices, and have little impact on individual valuations of the cultural good. The work of Coombe (1998), Coombe & Herman (2001), and that of Wipperfürth (2005), however, evidences the “hijack” of the meaning of star personas and super-brands. All texts scrutinized in these studies had come to have different meaning than their authors had originally intended, as was the case with my own unwitting transformation into a symbol of Cape Breton pride. This cooption of meaning suggests audience – not authorial – production. Also, my fieldwork has provided evidence that neither money nor expertise seems to determine success. This, as I have mentioned, is consistent with data in the music industry at large – suggesting that something other than musical genius and even persuasive advertising is at work in the value chain. Although possibly excessively reductive, there has also been recent experimental work that provides strong evidence that the nature of causality may be as I have argued. By building an artificial internetbased market for music, Salganic et al (2006) were able to parse-apart causality in a quantitative study. Social influence was found to be the overwhelming determinant of the popularity of particular songs. If there were intrinsic values in particular songs, and if individuals did have particular tastes for music, these things were quickly subsumed and negated by social influence in their experiment. Implications and Applications – Culture and Copyright The research presented above inspires a number of conclusions. First, not only is the work of the traditionally defined author not the singular point of the production of cultural value, neither is this value creation dispersed about a number of sites of production. The cultural value of such symbolic goods is created by audiences. Although the cultural text may be produced in many places throughout a production process, all the cultural value added to that text is produced by the audience alone. Whether or not a recording becomes culturally valuable depends on an audience productive process that seems to be largely immune to the control of authors and even advertisers. Second, the research presented here suggests that audience production occurs in what can not be described as simply “mass culture.” Although CDs of local artists are mass produced, often these discs are sold directly by the artist to the consumer. Audience members often interact directly with the producer of the text at shows, through friends, through family, and at parties as well. Indeed, this producer may be part of the community and the audience, as I have argued, is part of the production. Even in intimate concert settings, the musicians in my study admitted, the quality of the audience seems to determine the perceived (on the part of the audience) quality of the show. Arguments that posit audience creativity as the result of mechanical reproduction that diminishes authorial control over the “aura” of works of art do not seem to apply here. The increased proliferation of texts that is indicative of the information economy 48 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY, VOLUME 2 may increase the rate of change from one empty signifier to another. Digitization might make such cultural movements more easily observable than in other times. Neither of these claims can be taken, however, as evidence that audiences are any more culturally productive in digitized mass culture than they are in any other space. Culture works at all levels – from the community hall to the computer network. These conclusions yield implications for the way we conceive of issues concerning the structure of the culture industry and the justification of copyright law. The culture industry has little control over what exact texts audiences choose to endow with cultural significance. The claims of unpredictability that were expressed by many in my study, and continue to be expressed by representatives of the international music industry (RIAA, 2003) may in fact be true. The exact texts that audiences choose to create cultural value are selected via the audience’s own discretion through a complex and unpredictable consecration process. In response, the culture industry has little choice but to make its products ubiquitous through extreme promotion expenditure. By scattering empty signifiers across the human cultural landscape, the large multinationals of the culture industry assure that when the audience decides to produce value in something, the raw material closest at hand is owned by Sony Music Group, Bertelsmann Music Group, Universal Music Group, or AOL-TimeWarner. Alternatively, advertising might be used with the intent of misleading audiences into believing that their product has been consecrated as a culturally valuable symbol. Such is the case with newer advertising techniques that pay for the services of influential individuals in directing cultural creativity toward their product – in other words, “seeding” the creativity of “tribal” audiences (Wipperfürth, 2005; Cova & Cova, 2002). Both scattering and seeding techniques can be expected only to be viable when the cultural products thusly promoted have been made the exclusive property of a legally recognized owner. This is the function of particular forms of intellectual property rights. Since seeding is a manipulative act and scattering potentially wasteful, justifications for the rights in culture which facilitate such actions must be scrutinized. Copyright law is the institution that serves to transform cultural value into economic value in most cases, although rights to publicity associated with the artist personae, trade marks, and the embodiment of the cultural signifying value in material goods such as t-shirts are also utilized in this respect (Coombe, 1998). In this way, the productive labour of the audience is expropriated by the owner of the copyright, t-shirt, or personae. Such expropriation requires justification. The strongest justifications of intellectual property rights in culture are utilitarian in nature (Hettinger, 1989; Drahos, 2005). As Towse (2004) explains, efficient allocation of resources within a capitalist economy relies on the complete application of private property rights. Such rights stimulate the productive behaviour of what are assumed to be atomistic, insatiable, and egoistic human creatures by assuring that they alone will benefit from the fruits of their labour. For a property right to be truly private, however, the good in question must be both excludable (I can exclude you from using it unless you pay) and rival (the good is depleted in its consumption, therefore my use of it excludes you from using it). Cultural economists, such as Throsby (2001) and Dayton-Johnson (2000), are quick to assert that most cultural goods do not adhere to these stipulations. A musical composition and recorded performances of it, they explain, may be consumed simultaneously by many people and may be copied infinitely and distributed widely for little or no cost. This makes a composition, a recorded piece of music, even the personae of the affiliated celebrity a public good by definition. The creators of such work cannot enforce payment for its use and therefore face reduced economic incentive to produce. As a result, the argument goes, the market will undersupply the good. Copyright is an artificial corrective to the non-excludable and non-rival nature of cultural goods – it creates a market where none would otherwise exist. Thus copyright is utilitarian. It is institutionalized to stimulate the production of cultural texts by traditionally defined authors. Those texts which are valued by a waiting audience will yield great economic rewards (Hettinger, 1989; Drahos, 2005; Towse, 2004; Throsby, 2001; Dayton-Johnson, 2000). According to my argument, to attribute copyright to the producer of value in the case of cultural goods would suggest that payment be made to audiences for their services. The utility argument would imply, however, that such a payment would undermine the provision of raw cultural texts for the audience’s productive use. Copyright law therefore must be constructed in a way that ensures the sufficient provision of empty signifiers to act as inputs for audience productivity. The failure rate of major recordings suggests that there may be a problem of inefficiency due to overproduction of these raw materials. This inefficiency may have been prompted by the artificially created incentive provided by copyright law. Since the type of incentive required to spur audience production is social, not material, a utilitarian argument would suggest a weakening, perhaps even abolishment, of copyright. This would require an analysis of the incentive structure required to provide empty signifying texts to audiences. Given TIM MACNEILL 49 the pleasure inherent in artistic production, it does not follow that material incentives are required here. Further study is necessary regarding this question. Conclusion What is clear from this study is that analysis must begin with the assumption that it is the audience, and not the traditionally defined author, that is the source of the cultural value that may be commodified to produce economic value. 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Brand Hijack: Marketing without Marketing. New York: Portfolio. About the Author Tim MacNeill Tim has a six CD discography dating back to 1990. Music distinctions include "Alternative Artist of the Year" in East Coast Music Awards (ECMA) Canada (2001), Nominee "Rock/Pop Artist of the Year" Canadian National Independent Music Awards (2001), Nomination for ECMA "Alt. Artist of the Year" (1999), various national and regional showcases as well as national and regional appearences in media programs regarding cultural policy in music. Academically, he completed a Masters degree in Development Economics in 2003, where he studied the nature of cultural industries. Currently Tim is completing a Doctorate in Communication and Cultural Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada. Main study is in the culture of economy and the economics of culture. THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY EDITORS Mary Kalantzis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Robyn Archer, Performer/Director. Former Artistic Director, European Capital of Culture 2008, Liverpool, UK. Tressa Berman, Executive Director, BorderZone Arts, Inc., San Francisco, USA; Visiting Research Faculty, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia. Judy Chicago, Artist and Author, New Mexico, USA. James Early, Director of Cultural Heritage Policy, Smithsonian Institution, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and Acting-Interim Director, Anacostia Museum Center for African American History, USA. Mehdi Faridzadeh, President, International Society for Iranian Culture (ISIC), New York and Tehran, Iran. Jennifer Herd, Artist, Curator, and Founding Faculty, Bachelor of Visual Arts in Contemporary Indigenous Arts, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. Fred Ho, Composer, Writer, Producer. New York, USA. Andrew Jacubowicz, Faculty of Humanities, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Gerald McMaster, Curator of Canadian Art, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada. Mario Minichiello, Academic Director and Chair, Loughborough University School of Art and Design, UK. Fred Myers, Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, New York University, USA. Darcy Nicholas, Contemporary Maori Artist. General Manager, Porirua City Council, Pataka Museum of Arts and Cultures, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Arthur Sabatini, Associate Professor of Performance Studies, Arizona State University, USA. Cima Sedigh, President, Global Education and Health Alliance, Faculty of Education, Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, USA. Peter Sellars, Opera Director, World Cultures Program, University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Judy Spokes, Director, Cultural Development Network, Australia. Tonel (Antonio Eligio), Artist, Art Critic, University of British Columbia, Canada, and Havana, Cuba. Marianne Wagner-Simon, Independent Curator and Producer, Berlin, Germany. Please visit the Journal website at http://www.Arts-Journal.com for further information: - ABOUT the Journal including Scope and Concerns, Editors, Advisory Board, Associate Editors and Journal Profile - FOR AUTHORS including Publishing Policy, Submission Guidelines, Peer Review Process and Publishing Agreement SUBSCRIPTIONS The Journal offers individual and institutional subscriptions. For further information please visit http://ija.cgpublisher.com/subscriptions.html Inquiries can be directed to subscriptions@commongroundpublishing.com INQUIRIES Email: cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com