Taking the Gift Out and Putting It Back In

Abstract

This chapter considers how musicians and others create or increase the economic value of cultural commodities. There are two means discussed here: the first is supply chain capitalism as theorized by Anna Tsing, in which value is created at various nodes of a supply chain through processes of translation and purification that appear to strip away the noncapitalist social relations and noneconomic forms of value that went into the production of a particular cultural good. Processes of consecration and/or promotion (broadly understood as advertising, marketing, and branding) form the other main way that economic value of cultural commodities can be created, reanimating them with values that masquerade as noneconomic forms of value. In essence, this chapter argues that, through supply chain capitalism and processes of translation, capitalism appears to take the gift out of the commodity by alienating labor and masking social relations, but through advertising, marketing, and branding inserts representations of unalienated labor and social relations to make the commodity seem like a gift again.