Paper short abstract:

The music industry is on the cusp of the wide scale emergence of music as an asset class as a node on the larger move towards its wide scale financialization. This paper argues that this development risks the hybridization of existing modes of extraction under the guise of democratic enterprising.

Paper long abstract:

The music industry is on the cusp of the wide scale emergence of music as an asset class. This move is significant because this type of investment was once only accessible to a privileged closed group within the music industry’s upper echelons. With this development, platforms like JKBX (pronounced jukebox) are emerging with promises of democratising access to music as an asset class whereby music fans will be able to own parts of their favourite recordings. JKBX is not alone in this lane as platforms like AcreTrader, Masterworks, Labelcoin and SongVest have been offering what is touted as “fractional” song trading since 2021 (Hochberg). JKBX has been positioned as a game-changing platform amongst music industry insiders and artists because of the backers, song catalogue and validation from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) give it a significant starting advantage (Marshall). This paper argues that the wide scale emergence of music as an asset class, that supposedly ushers in a golden financialized age for the music industry, in which the music industry’s financialization risks the reproduction of hybridised forms of existing modes of extraction guised as democratic enterprising. JKBX will provide the case throughout this examination. This paper hopes to contribute to ongoing discourse on the contemporary practices that the drive the business of music by unpacking how these contemporary datafication efforts and their resulting systems coat “deeper, uneven and shifting layers of histories” of music industry “development and change” (Reilly and Flores 2).