Ethnomusicology and the Music Industries: An Overview

This paper functions as an introduction to the present volume as a whole, and charts the relationship between ethnomusicology and the music industries, particularly record companies, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers the changing relationship between these two sometimes antagonistic parties, and how this has informed or influenced other relationships with those musicians around the globe whose ‘world music’1 1. I make a typographic distinction here between ‘world music’ as a convenient shorthand to describe a wide variety of (often traditional) music cultures around the globe, and ‘World Music’ to refer to those frequently synthetic and commodified musical styles subsumed under that description by various music industries since the late 1980s. (broadly construed) each has engaged with for its own purposes. It also considers how the stance of ethnomusicologists towards record companies has changed, as the discipline itself has evolved over the past ca. 120 years. Finally, it asks whether ethnomusicology can itself be considered a music industry.