Sharing Sounds: Musical Innovation, Collaboration, and Ideological Expression in the Chilean Netlabel Movement

摘要

In recent years technological advances have triggered radical shifts in the ways people produce, disseminate, perform, and consume music across the globe. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of these overarching transformations by examining the creative and social practices of Chilean electronic musicians affiliated with a relatively new class of non-commercial, Internet-based music distribution services known as netlabels. While maintaining ideological commitments to provide free access to their musical catalogs, these collectives allow affiliated musicians to share innovative works through an alternative venue, removed from the commodifying pressures that have governed the circulation of recorded music for over a century. To cultivate a more collaborative rather than competitive or proprietary creative environment, netlabel artists also generally release their works under the customizable guidelines of Creative Commons licenses, which enable content producers to offer others default permissions for the reuse, remixing, and/or sampling of their work.;Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted primarily among electronica, electroacoustic, and electro-pop musicians associated with the Santiago-based netlabels Pueblo Nuevo, Jacobino Discos, and Michita Rex, this dissertation analyzes the nature of musical innovation, collaboration, and ideological expression in this historically unprecedented context. It applies the art world theory of Howard Becker (1983) to explore how musicians realize their works and reconceive what is artistically possible in relation to evolving creative circumstances. It relates theories of public discourse and community formation to the realities of new media fragmentation as it examines how netlabels provide a platform for artists to collaborate, communicate, and establish expansive social networks bound by shared aesthetics and social convictions. Incorporating theories of artistic experimentalism, this dissertation further investigates the ideological dimensions of the netlabel movement and their relationship to leftist social movements in Latin America. Lastly, this work offers a musicological case study illuminating a broader transnational paradigm shift in the nature of cultural production and dissemination. According to Creative Commons co-founder Lawrence Lessig (2008), this shift reflects a transition from the "read only" model of the past century, marked by passive consumption and the strictly commercial exchange of media culture, to the more democratic and participatory "read/write" model of the digital era.