Tracing Paths of Music Consumption in Montreal and Cuba

By Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier

As part of the MusDig project, Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier conducted ethnographic fieldwork in three fieldsites: Montreal (Canada) and Havana and Santiago de Cuba (Cuba). The themes that prevail in Boudreault-Fournier’s fieldwork are consumption, circulation, and intellectual property rights.

Consumption

How do consumers stimulate new trends of music consumption on the Internet? How do different actors, including consumers, react and respond to such new emerging trends? Diverse emerging opportunities, interests and actors mediate those new consumption trends. Therefore, research in Montreal focused not only on consumers but, more significantly, on the relation between the strategies that consumers develop to get music for free, or at very low cost, and the responses of musicians, labels, producers, distributors and other consumers and actors to such trends. Also in Montreal, the issue of ‘prosumption’ was explored by conducting fieldwork among actors in an emergent music scene called Piu Piu. This scene could be described as a regional wave of post-hip-hop electronic music, or a new era of instrumental hip-hop, which can be located in the larger global beat scene. Approximately fifty creative beatmakers living in Montreal and the surrounding area, as well as Quebec City, are leading this emerging scene. Many actors, apart from the beatmakers, are involved in Piu Piu music. They are promoters, hip-hop heads, music aficionados, young hipsters and music consumers in general. The border between producer and consumer is continually challenged and redefined in this scene.

Circulation

In Cuba, access to the Internet is limited and slow. In this context, it is not surprising to observe other networks of digital data circulation and consumption based on mobile storage containers – most notably, memory sticks. Additionally, Cubans use a series of ‘reproducers’ (iPod, memory sticks with headphone plugs), external drives, SD cards, micro-SD cards, and copied CDs, VCDs and DVDs to acquire, consume, transport and share music (among other data). Consuming music and other audio-visual data is not a straightforward enterprise. Many consumers need to overcome a series of obstacles before they can actually listen to the music they own.  Fieldwork was conducted on how Cubans acquire, share and listen to music in different public and private settings. Storage devices – mainly memory sticks – are approached as mediators of complex social networks of sharing and music circulation. Direct contact between human bodies is intermediated by the memory stick devices (the digitally infected containers). The metaphors of contagion, infection and contamination build on Barbara Browning’s (1998; 2012) uses of those metaphors to discuss world music and the relationship between cultural transmission, political exploitation and disease. In using the word ‘virus’ in a metaphorical sense, I consider the contaminated memory stick and its content – the contaminators – as agents of mediation (see Born 2011).

Intellectual Property

The circulation of music by locally based enterprises that produce and distribute copied CDs, DVDs and VCDs in Cuba raises issues about intellectual property rights and authors’ rights. In 2010, after announcing a layoff of more than 500,000 Cubans working for the government, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security allowed some sectors of the economy to flourish on a private basis. Owning a small business with the possibility of hiring one employee became legal for the first time since the beginning of the Revolution. The legalisation of small enterprises targeted 178 professions, among them ‘Disc buyer and seller’ (Comprador vendedor de discos). Most of the research conducted on intellectual property relates to this network, which raises a series of complex questions and brings into play various perspectives on how authors’ rights are conceived and dealt with in Cuba today.