Mass Marketing, Music, and Morality

In recent years a good deal of attention has been paid to the role of music in marketing, and to the marketing of music. Mass marketing is endemic in music, its techniques having now spread from popular forms to classical music and jazz. Yet, despite their integral part in the production and consumption of music, little has been written about how musicians themselves view the marketing of what they consider to be 'their art'. The research involved interviewing over a dozen musicians about their beliefs about the ways in which modern marketing was affecting classical music and jazz. The results showed an emphatic divide between those who blamed marketing for undermining the artistic integrity of musicians and those who felt that marketing was already contributing to the well-being of music and needed to be better understood. Both groups, though, used similar ethical arguments to justify their positions.