Market failure: Punk economics, early and late

College Literature, Spring 2001 by Thompson, Stacy

The labor of the bandmembers must not be neglected, either. Although they do not have to sign away their "creative control," as they would with major labels, bands on Dischord and early Lookout! bands are and were still tacitly expected to tour the US. and sometimes Europe in order to promote their records. Touring means playing the same songs repeatedly in city after city. In short, the musicians' labor becomes repetitive, the songs become units of exchange-value rather than use-values, and, as Marx writes, "[a] s use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-- value" (1990, 128). In the sphere of touring, the bands' music loses much of its use-value to its creators, as they play it less and less for reasons other than its exchangeability, and it enters the market, as a punk rock "show," more and more as a commodity and faces all other commodities as a price, rather than as a unique form of labor with an immanent and non-quantitative value of its own.

Summarizing punk's complicity with commercialization, Frith writes: "`independent records: made by do-it-yourself companies [remain] commodities" and notes that "the most enterprising punk company [in England]-Rough Trade-was . . . based on a shop" (1981, 159). Today, Lookout! Records runs its own label-store, as do several other punk labels including Dr. Strange. Frith reads Rough Trade's shop- (consumerism-) based business practices as symptomatic of an "'alternative' production system that both paralleled the established industry (alternative shops sell records made by alternative record companies and featured in the Alternative Charts) and was integrated into it" (159).That integration continues in 2000 and is especially apparent in chain record stores, where Dischord and Lookout! products appear alongside the products of the Big Five. The distributors that the chains most frequently employ- often "one-stops," such as Pacific Coast, that carry the products of myriad corporate labels-might not carry Dischord and Lookout! products, but stores can still order directly from even the tiniest labels and bands or establish relationships with independent distributors, such as Southern or Mordam, that carry exclusively independent bands.

Dischord and Fugazi's attempted independence from and resistance to commercialism also suggest less a move toward a new mode of production than a nostalgia for an earlier one. MacKaye, especially, combines the role of musician with that of label-owner and manager, embodying an idea of entrepreneurialism that hearkens back to a romantic notion of classic capitalism, of a perhaps nonexistent bygone era, that attempted to satisfy real needs with the best possible commodities. He seems to have entered the music industry for a non-commercial reason: because he is wholly invested in it as a performer and artisan and wants to make it a more just and fair field of production for other musicians and not simply because he saw an economic opportunity in it. Nevertheless, he operates as a small-scale capitalist.