Music, Digital Culture, and the New Economy

Anne Jacqueline

Since the end of the 1990s, the music economy has been going digital, and digital is changing the world of music. Indeed, the market is more and more dominated by technical companies, most of them American, and for whom music is a worldwide attractive product. But the Big 4 (Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon) interest is not so much in music itself, but in finding ways to make people come and spend time on their platform.
In turn, music fans don’t need to buy music anymore. Streaming platforms — among which Youtube is the biggest —, allow them to listen to millions of tracks and watch endless hours of video for a small fee, or even for free, — while gathering, analyzing and monetizing their data. For the artist or the record company, then, time is becoming even a bigger issue than income, as the content uploaded daily on the internet spans more than a lifetime. This, in short, is the new economy of music, in which music professionals have to find new ways to exist, and that I propose to explore in the seminar.
After graduating from Sciences Politiques Paris , Anne Jacqueline got her 1st year Ph. D. in Intercultural Studies (relationships between French-speaking and English-speaking zones) from Paris 13 University. She is now a consultant in digital marketing, working with Absilone, a French rights management and music digital distribution company, in which she manages digital content (audio and video) and helps artists and labels with their online strategies. She is also manager of a singer-songwriter, Yasmine Modestine.