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The Managers, the Managed, and theUnmanageable: Negotiating Values atthe Buenos Aires International MusicFairMorgan James LukerPublished online: 19 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Morgan James Luker (2010) The Managers, the Managed, and theUnmanageable: Negotiating Values at the Buenos Aires International Music Fair, EthnomusicologyForum, 19:1, 89-113, DOI: 10.1080/17411911003675365

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The Managers, the Managed, and theUnmanageable: Negotiating Values atthe Buenos Aires International MusicFairMorgan James Luker

Diversity has become a key discourse of international cultural policy-making following the

neoliberal turn. This article traces how diversity discourses were put into practice by the city

government of Buenos Aires, Argentina, following the devastating 2001 Argentine

economic crisis, taking the first Buenos Aires International Music Fair (BAFIM) as a

case study. A key event within broader policies aimed at developing the local music industry

as both an economic and a cultural resource, BAFIM was designed to use diversity as

a means of reconfiguring the economic, social, and cultural domains of the city. While the

fair opened fields of action in which subjects could make newly productive moves, a critical

examination of the fair also demonstrates that diversity, in and of itself, is not

a democratising paradigm.

Keywords: Cultural Diversity; Cultural Policy; Music Industry; Independent Record

Labels; Argentina

In late 2001, following nearly a decade of neoliberal reform of economic and social

policies, Argentina entered a profound period of economic crisis. During the crisis,

the nation’s Gross Domestic Product rapidly dropped by 15%, the open unemploy-

ment rate rose to 25%, and the number of households living in poverty reached

nearly 50% (Felix 2002, 4). In the following years, and in congruence with the

Morgan James Luker received a PhD with distinction in ethnomusicology from Columbia University, and is

currently serving as an associate lecturer in ethnomusicology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His

studies focus on music and cultural policy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with a special interest in the cultural

politics of contemporary tango. His work has been published in Latin American Music Review and presented at

conferences in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Correspondence to: Morgan James Luker, School

of Music, College of Letters and Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 4521 Mosse Humanities Building,

455 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706-1483, USA. Email: mjluker@wisc.edu

ISSN 1741-1912 (print)/ISSN 1741-1920 (online)/10/010089-25

# 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17411911003675365

Ethnomusicology Forum

Vol. 19, No. 1, June 2010, pp. 89�113

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broader Latin American trends analysed by Yudice (2003), key policy-makers within

the city government of Buenos Aires turned to culture as a newly productive resource

for economic and social development; with particular attention given to bolstering

the local cultural industries in general, and the local music industry specifically.

Contrary to Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002) classic critique of the culture industry,

and as Yudice (2003) carefully argues, such a turn towards culture as an expedient

resource does not (or does not only) represent yet another functionalist capitulation

to capitalist manipulation and domination on the part of the state, but a broader

transformation in the role of the state, the private sector, and civil society in contexts

that have been radically reconfigured following neoliberal reform. Like the

international frontiers studied by Grimson and Kessler (2005), neoliberalism has

not erased or eroded the state’s interest in the cultural domain but instead

transformed its reach and extended its power: ‘[its] function and meanings have

changed, but in many ways [it] is stronger than ever’ (Grimson and Kessler 2005, 22).

This article traces changes in the function and meaning of the cultural industries as

an object of governmental intervention in post-crisis Buenos Aires, taking the city-

produced Buenos Aires International Music Fair (BAFIM) as an ethnographic case

study. This is part of a larger research project on the cultural politics of music in post-

crisis Buenos Aires (Luker 2009), based on ethnographic data collected over 18

months of fieldwork in Argentina between 2004 and 2007. The material presented

here was primarily gathered through participant observation research at BAFIM and

follow-up interviews with policy-makers, music industry figures, journalists,

musicians, and others who were involved with the fair, only some of whom are

directly represented in the text. I also draw upon a variety of documents produced by

the city government of Buenos Aires during the production and promotion of the

fair.

Taking place from 16 to 19 November 2006, BAFIM was a key event within broader

governmental policies aimed at developing the local music industry and the auxiliary

economic activities related to it (among them, graphic design, print and broadcast

media, and the exportation of cultural goods). As articulated by Stella Puente, the city

government’s then Sub-Secretary of Cultural Industries,1 who was credited with

developing the idea and concept of BAFIM:

With the state in its role as facilitator and promoter, BAFIM is a fair that proposesmultiple spaces of participation, training, and interchange; a rich, diverse, and free

artistic programme; and a space of business opportunities for the industry:international visits, live concerts, conferences, discussions, musical encounters, discsales, business meetings, showcases, and more. (Puente 2006, 7)

As this multiplicity of activities suggests, and as will be examined in detail below,

BAFIM was organised and produced according to a relatively recent but nevertheless

deep commitment to diversity on the part of cultural policy-makers and other

functionaries working within the city government of Buenos Aires at the time. The

rise and institutionalisation of diversity as a key discourse within the city government

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reflects a broader trend that can be observed at variously local, national, regional, and

international levels (see Cohen 2007 on the city of Liverpool; Bennett 2001 on the

European Union). Indeed, governmental and non-governmental groups the world

over have come to frame their collective argument against subjecting the cultural

industries to the full application of international free trade agreements as a matter of

protecting and promoting cultural diversity, the ultimate example of which is the

2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of

Cultural Expressions. The convention reaffirms:

the specific nature of cultural goods and services as vehicles of identity, values, andmeaning’, and asserts that ‘cultural activities, goods and services have both aneconomic and a cultural nature . . . and must therefore not be treated as solelyhaving commercial value. (UNESCO 2005, 3)

As it is understood in these contexts, then, diversity does not refer to any kind of

ethnic and/or racial difference but to variety in media content and point of origin.

Cultural policy-makers posit this type of diversity as a core component of both

maintaining viable cultural and/or national identities in the wake of cultural

globalisation, and helping formulate economically productive cultural development

programmes within an international milieu that is dominated by a handful of core

cultural producers, particularly the US. The cultural industries*defined by UNESCO

as ‘industries that combine the creation, production and commercialisation of creative

contents which are intangible and cultural in nature’ (UNESCO n.d., 3)*occupy a

privileged position within this diversity-driven schema because their products*cultural goods and/or services usually protected by copyright*generate both

intangible cultural value and economic value simultaneously (see also Throsby 2003).

But even when confined to this highly circumscribed formulation of the cultural

domain*the very significance of which has been challenged from both the right

and the left*the mobilisation of diversity as practice and discourse entails an

exercise of power, the consequences of which extend far beyond the parsing of

bureaucratic jargon. Diversity discourses are now fully entrenched within the

broader managerial regimes that necessarily frame musical practices of all sorts in

Buenos Aires and far beyond, and thereby play a key role in shaping the form,

content, meaning, and circulation of musical sounds and practices. Understanding

how these discourses are drawn upon and used in local contexts therefore poses

both a crucial challenge and a ripe opportunity for ethnomusicological inquiry.

Musical ethnography, in particular, represents an especially important route into the

rigorous critique of cultural policy as cultural practice (Born 1995; Negus 1999;

Ochoa 2003), and points to the types of contributions ethnomusicology could make

to the expanding critical literature on the industrial production and/or govern-

mental management of cultural practices beyond the anxious or celebratory

positions associated with the world music debate (Feld 2001).2

I begin with an examination of the bureaucratic organisation and implementation

of BAFIM, showing how a newly generalised commitment to diversity on the part of

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the city government of Buenos Aires as a whole enabled the fair’s governmental

producers to effectively negotiate previously insurmountable divisions between the

cultural and economic values of music both within the city government and

between the public and private sectors. I then examine how and why independent

record labels (discograficas independientes), which occupied a prominent position at

BAFIM, were brought to the forefront of governmental concerns regarding the

diversity of the local cultural industries. I show how governmental concern with

increasing musical diversity*that is, the volume and variety of local musical

production*was coupled with efforts to cultivate a non-standardised but none-

theless limited set of managerial best practices among independent labels. I argue

that these contradictory tendencies were enabled by the highly ambiguous meaning

of the term ‘independent’ as it was used in this context, and briefly examine how

these processes have resonated with the goals of various non-local actors,

particularly international digital music distribution companies. I conclude by

highlighting some of the consequences diversity discourses have had regarding the

broader social and cultural challenges facing post-crisis Argentina (Svampa 2005),

where lingering institutional ideologies within the city government of Buenos Aires

continue to privilege certain cultural actors over a truly pluralistic diversity. In

specifically musical contexts such as BAFIM, these issues converge on a distinctly

Latin American notion of the popular, which, as used in discussions of popular

music, articulates not only particular forms of musical style and mediation but also

lingering hierarchies of musical value that are closely correlated with macro-patterns

of social exclusion and inclusion (Capellano 2004).

At the same time, it is important to recognise that these policies emerged as the

creative response of individual policy-makers and their allies to the material and

political realities of neoliberalism in Argentina. Therefore, policies designed to

exploit the multiple values of culture in post-crisis Buenos Aires, while clearly top-

down, should not be taken only as a hegemonic imposition from above and/or

outside, as many critical analyses of neoliberalism would have it (see Klein 2007).

Like the related discourse of multiculturalism, diversity opens fields of action in

which subjects operate in ways that cannot be entirely accounted for through

theories of domination and resistance, in that these policies both extend the reach

of the state authority into new domains and attempt to account for at least some of

the demands of previously silenced groups (Escobar 2008). This is not to say that

diversity somehow diminishes or erodes power, but that it fragments and diffuses it,

creating an almost gravitational binding effect that reinforces the sometimes

radically uneven power relations within and between cultural actors*in this case,

the participants at BAFIM*while simultaneously enmeshing their activities

together in a web of interdependence that may be more flexible than previous

configurations, but only to the extent that winners and losers are not as readily

identifiable as such.

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The Managers: Cultural Policy and Cultural Production in Post-crisis Buenos

Aires

BAFIM was organised and produced by the city government’s Discograficas de

Buenos Aires programme. Housed within the larger Sub-Secretariat of Cultural

Industries, the Discograficas programme’s mission at the time of my primary

fieldwork (2006�07) was ‘to help the promotion and development of the independent

recording industry in Argentina, contributing actions to the valuable and complex

work of pursuing cultural diversity in the music produced by these labels’.3 This

statement directly frames governmental support of the private sector as a matter of

public interest in as much as such governmental interventions aim to promote

cultural diversity. Within this conceptual framework, BAFIM was designed to foster a

collaborative interchange between private businesses, public audiences and the state;

it was to be, in the words of the fair’s official catalogue:

an experience that functions at once as a convention, a festival, and an expositionfor boosting the growth, reflection, and spread of music . . ., an initiative that willpermit a strengthening and expansion of the diversity and artistic quality of theBuenos Aires music scene. (Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires 2006a, 1)

Cultivating this kind of synergistic, diversity-driven relationship within and between

the public and private sectors was a key feature of the fair, reflected in almost every

aspect of its production. Within the city government, the Discograficas programme

received production and technical assistance for BAFIM from the Sub-Secretariat of

Cultural Industries as a whole*especially the General Directorate for the Promotion

and Exportation of Cultural Goods, which coordinated the fair’s international relations

and guests. The participation of international guests and the projection of Argentine

music abroad was a central goal of BAFIM, to the point that the international aspect of

the fair was included in its name. As Nicolas Wainszelbaum, the coordinator of the

Discograficas programme and the intellectual architect of BAFIM, explained:

Our fundamental aim is to establish BAFIM as an international fair, so that it is thereference point fair for Latin America. There is no other major Latin Americanmusic fair, so we hope to use BAFIM to position Buenos Aires as an internationalspace, a Latin American space for the music business. (Nicolas Wainszelbaum,interview, Buenos Aires, 12 December 2006)4

Towards this end, more than a dozen ‘VIPs’ from Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile,

France, and the US were invited to and attended BAFIM. I worked as a bilingual

guide for some of these international guests, responsible for making sure that they got

to where they wanted and needed to go.

Beyond the Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries, BAFIM received additional

production assistance from the city’s General Directorate for Music, which helped

produce the many live musical performances that took place at the fair. Housed

within the larger Ministry of Culture, the General Directorate for Music’s primary

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mission was to serve the needs of musicians as artists outside any explicitly economic

concerns, mainly by organising and producing many free, public performances that

took place in the city throughout the year. These performances were seen as not only

fostering musical creativity within the city but also supplementing private musical

activities that were often financially inaccessible for many city residents, especially

following the economic crisis.5 This approach stood in striking contrast to that of the

Discograficas programme, which, like the Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries as a

whole, was at the time housed within the larger Ministry of Production and generally

orientated around issues of economic productivity. However, because BAFIM was

able to locate both the cultural and the economic priorities of the larger city

government within an overarching rubric of diversity, the fair was able to bridge the

many ideological and institutional differences that have traditionally separated these

Ministries.

In addition to the production support provided by these and other units of the

larger city government, BAFIM also received financial support from a variety of

private-sector actors. The fair’s official co-sponsor was the Argentine Chamber of

Phonographic Industry Producers (CAPIF), a national music industry trade

organisation and the local member of the International Federation of the

Phonographic Industry. More than 35 additional businesses and organisations

made some kind of financial and/or in-kind donation to BAFIM. But even having

obtained support from a variety of private or semi-private donors, the city

government itself covered the majority of the fair’s production costs. While this

lack of significant private support might seem somewhat surprising given the

ubiquity of private sponsorship for even the most public of cultural events in the US

and other contexts in the global north, private sponsorship for cultural events or

institutions has historically been very rare in Argentina.6 Therefore, those policy-

makers within the city government who favoured developing a more synergistic

relationship between public and private support of culture in Buenos Aires

considered even the tentative contributions from a relatively diverse group of private

actors to be a very significant step, symbolically if not materially.

At the same time, the fair’s liminality between the public and the private sectors

also speaks to how and why diversity has emerged as a powerful managerial discourse

in post-crisis Buenos Aires. Previously, Culture with a capital ‘C’*that is, culture as

the arts, and little if anything else*was considered a necessary object of

governmental intervention and support because it could serve in the disciplining

of what Toby Miller has called an ‘ethically incomplete’ citizenry (Miller 1993) and/or

be used to articulate the hegemony of a singular national culture. The managerial

discourse of cultural diversity, on the other hand, greatly expands the most basic ideas

of what culture is and how it operates in society, providing both legalistic and ethical

frameworks for state intervention in the cultural industries and other ‘newly’ cultural

areas that were previously outside the scope of traditional cultural policymaking

(Miller and Yudice 2002). From this perspective, the goal of public policy is no longer

to preserve and/or protect a national culture, but to enact and mobilise cultural

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diversity as the object of previously rare but now potentially limitless collaborations

within and between the public and private sectors (see Curzi, Stoddart, and Pilon

2001). Such collaborations both create value and are taken to be valuable in and of

themselves, which is precisely why even the radically downsized neoliberal state

retains its interest in culture as an object of governmental management and

intervention.

So what was the fair actually like? BAFIM took place in ‘El Dorrego,’ a city-owned

event and exhibition space that occupies an entire block on the edge of what has

come to be called the ‘Palermo Hollywood’ district in the city’s northern sector. For

BAFIM, the interior space of the warehouse-like building was arranged around two

performance stages located on either side of the cavernous room. What was called the

‘principal stage’, on the left from the main entrance, hosted performances by artists

selected by CAPIF in conjunction with the Discograficas programme. The ‘alternative

stage’, to the right, featured more experimental performances. In addition to these

two indoor stages, there was also an outdoor ‘patio’ space that featured acoustic or

‘unplugged’ performances in the late afternoons, weather permitting. Together the

three performance spaces hosted some 23 concerts over the fair’s 4 days, not

including several private showcases that took place offsite. The headlining concerts on

the main stage were deliberately programmed to maximise the fair’s benefits for the

principal actors in the local music industry: presenting a range of different genres that

are considered important by the local music industry (such as rock, pop, jazz, tango

and folklore); representing artists from a variety of different record labels, both

multinational and independent; and featuring artists whose stature would attract

capacity or near-capacity crowds.7 The artists presented on the alternative stage were

programmed by the Argentine musician and music journalist Gustavo Alvarez

Nunez, who organised the performances within the theme of ‘musical crossings’.

These concerts paired two like-minded musicians or groups for one-off performances

that were designed to create situations where something musically unexpected could

happen while at the same time introducing fans of one artist to the work of another.8

The performances were each about an hour long and alternated between the two

indoor stages. The first groups began playing at either 4:00 or 6:00 p.m., making for

continuous live performances up to about 10:00 or 11:00 in the evening, when the

main headlining act would conclude their set and the fair would wrap up for the day.

Filling the large space between the two primary stages were some 70 exhibition

stands occupied by businesses or organisations representing almost every aspect of

music-making as a cultural industry in Buenos Aires: recording and mastering

studios, music schools, graphic design and printing companies, compact disc

reproducers and manufacturers, publishers, instrument-makers, distribution com-

panies, record and book stores, media (including music-themed magazines and

television stations), and production companies, among others. The majority of stands

at BAFIM, however, were occupied by record labels, with more than 40 local,

national, and international companies in attendance, including representatives of all

of the so-called ‘major’ or multinational labels (which were, at the time, EMI Music

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Argentina, Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner Music Argentina). The labels’ stands

were usually staffed by one or two employees and were stocked with a variety of

promotional materials, such as catalogues and samplers aimed at industry profes-

sionals as well as general merchandise, usually CDs, available for sale to the public.

For many of the smaller labels, the opportunity to make sales directly to their publics

was one of the principal reasons for participating in BAFIM, since it can be difficult if

not impossible for them to have their materials adequately stocked in mainstream

record stores due to the limitations of independent distribution networks. For larger

independent labels and the multinationals, potential sales were secondary to the

opportunities for making professional contacts and building relationships for future

business agreements.

BAFIM also included a dozen professional development presentations on themes

ranging from ‘the music industry and author’s rights in Latin America’ to ‘how to

prepare yourself to go to MIDEM’ to ‘legal aspects of music and film’ to ‘the future of

digital music.’ These and other capacity-building presentations were targeted at the

fair’s accredited attendees, mostly record label owners and other music industry

professionals, and took place in the mornings before the grounds were opened to

the public. More general discussions were organised for the afternoons, including a

series that covered the chronological history of Argentine rock music, a discussion

series featuring members of musical families talking about their lives and works

individually or together, film screenings, and panel discussions. All in all more than

2000 representatives of the music industry participated in BAFIM and some 35,000

members of the general public attended the fair over its 4 days.

BAFIM was considered successful by the governmental managers who organised

and produced it because the fair was able to gather these heterogeneous cultural

actors within an elaborately managed event where ambivalences and antagonisms

could be transformed into synergistic opportunities for both immediate and future

development, be it cultural and/or economic. Like the ‘cunning recognition’ that

Povinelli (2002) has located at the core of liberal multiculturalism, BAFIM took an

unruly difference*different styles and genres of music, different scales and practices

of production, different business models, different cultural values, different artistic

goals*and turned it into a more manageable diversity. This is a crucial shift, for

while ‘difference’ might have engendered apathy if not outright hostility within and

between this heterogeneous set of musical actors, ‘diversity’ incorporated that

heterogeneity into a single, robust market of musical production. For governmental

managers, such a market would not only be capable of exploiting music as an

economic resource in more efficient and creative ways, but would also enhance the

expedient power of music in as much as it could be used to contribute to the broader

goals of articulating new relationships between the public and private sectors and

projecting Buenos Aires as a creative city within international networks of cultural

production and consumption. However, while these managerial projects clearly put

the ideological autonomy or inalienability of music (and music-making) as ‘art’ into

question, they do not represent a totalising reorientation of the cultural sphere along

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economic lines. Indeed, the market formed and enacted by diversity discourses is not

an instrumentally economic imposition that somehow overrides the many non-

economic values of artistic practice, but ‘a structure of symbolic transformation’ that

‘does not necessarily erase all the distinctions embodied in objects’ and practices:

‘other systems of value may coexist, [though] their meaning may be reconstructed in

relation to the presence of market practices’ (Myers 2001, 59).

The Managed: Independent Record Labels as the Subjects of Diversity

In this section, I turn to how the productive tensions between variously cultural and/

or economic regimes of value were negotiated in the practices of BAFIM’s

participants, particularly the independent record labels that had been singled out

as ideal recipients of diversity-driven governmental attention. On the one hand,

diversity discourses were used to call forth independent record labels as a particular

type of business identity in need of governmental support, supervision and control in

ways that are not entirely unlike the many ethnic identities hailed by multi-

culturalism. On the other hand, diversity discourses also made new types of strategic

partnerships within and between independent record labels more visible and more

viable, enabling individual independent labels and the sector as a whole to make

strategic moves that were not entirely foreseen by governmental managers.

Making sense of how this worked is partially a matter of tracing how the cultural

materials animated by BAFIM moved within and between different regimes of

cultural and/or economic value. However, unlike the ‘global flows’ across space and

time privileged by Appadurai (1996) and others, the important movements here were

within and between specific (and largely, although not entirely, local) institutional

contexts.9 The other important moves made at BAFIM, of course, were those of the

many actors and agents*including the governmental managers*who participated

in the fair as a way of furthering their intention-filled projects or ‘serious games’

(Ortner 1996). The movement and circulation of musical artefacts within and across

institutional contexts, then, was not just a cultural phenomenon but a cultural tactic,

exercises in power that contributed to and, at times, detracted from the broader goals

of a particular acting subject or group.

The city government gave independent record labels special priority within their

larger policy schemes because independent labels were believed to meet both the

cultural and productive expectations of diversity discourses so thoroughly. As Nicolas

Wainszelbaum, the director of the Discograficas programme, explained:

Independent labels are our primary audience, whose needs dictate the direction of

the programme. In many cases, they are profitable businesses, with employees and

offices or buildings. The majority, however, are run in a very informal manner, in

many cases only working out of a room in a house, in conditions that are almost ‘en

negro’ [outside of state regulation and without paying taxes]. But, at the same time,

they are the ones who sustain a level of musical diversity that the multinational

labels are unable to sustain. By diversity I mean artists who are not on the rosters of

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Sony or EMI or Universal but who are coming up with something new, who have alot to say, though they might not sell a great quantity of records. The independentlabels foster this kind of diversity, which is something that [the city government is]interested in sustaining, supporting, and promoting. (Nicolas Wainszelbaum,interview, Buenos Aires, 12 December 2006)

So, despite the general prioritisation of economic development on the part of the

Discograficas programme and the Sub-Secretariat for Cultural Industries as a whole,

the cultural value represented in and produced by independent record labels

remained a key justification for governmental support of the independent music

sector.

At the same time, the cultural value of the music produced by independent record

labels could be converted into significant economic value, both for the individual

labels and for the city as a whole, if the sector was ‘properly’ managed. From the

government’s perspective, this was primarily a matter of increasing the level of

professionalism among the city’s large but*as the government saw it*mostly rag-

tag collection of independent labels. It was clearly a disciplinary project:

The state sustains, or helps to sustain, labels that would not be able to advance byother means. But we have to constantly be on their backs about it: Export! Bringmaterials! Bring photos! Pay your taxes! We have do it all the time. We help thempresent proposals for subsidies or credits, or with exporting, so that they can learnhow to do it. We provide them with a lot of resources so that they are able to grow.In many cases they understand it and in many cases they don’t. Some of themprefer not to innovate and just stay where they are. (Nicolas Wainszelbaum,interview, Buenos Aires, 12 December 2006)

Statements such as this demonstrate the contradiction at the heart of diversity as a

managerial discourse. On the one hand, city representatives justified institutional

support of independent record labels by declaring the sheer diversity of content

produced by such labels to be of an intangible value to the city and its consumers/

citizens. On the other hand, the city government only wholeheartedly supported

those labels that produced this diversity according to a non-standardised but

nonetheless limited criterion of managerial best practices. Those best practices were

identified by the city itself and imposed with a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude that

systematically excluded many independent labels that might otherwise have been

considered entirely worthy of inclusion, given that they clearly contributed to the

kind of diversity the city had prioritised. That is, they produced musical recordings.

Independent record labels that wished to participate in BAFIM by hosting a stand

at the fair were required to apply to the Discograficas programme and were vetted by

governmental managers according to the city’s standards of professionalism. For

BAFIM, this included continual activity for no fewer than two uninterrupted years

and a catalogue of no fewer than 10 actively available titles. Beyond these absolute

minimums, the governmental committee that evaluated applications also considered

the general image of the record label (or other industry related business), the

originality of their proposal, the quality of their products, the availability of those

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products for sale, the products’ commercial visibility within BAFIM as a whole, their

relevance to the mission of BAFIM, and their price range, which was expected to be

somewhat lower than they would otherwise be within the general marketplace

(Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires 2006b).

In the end, 35 independent record labels participated in BAFIM by organising a

stand. The participating labels ranged from well-established and relatively large-scale

companies such as Leader Music (with 1200 titles in their catalogue) and EPSA Music

(with almost 500 titles) to boutique labels like Oui-Oui Records (with 10 titles) and

Estamos Felices (with 12 titles). The remaining labels occupied a range between these

extremes, with the 25 labels for whom information was available carrying an average

of approximately 72 active titles in their catalogues. Of those, eight companies had

more than 100 and eight others had less than 25 titles. The primary business models

for these companies also varied significantly. Some, like Southern Unity Records and

Discos Crack, only produced new recordings of contemporary artists and often

concentrated their efforts on a specific genre such as jazz, tango or rock. Others, like

Euro Records, specialised in reissuing historic recordings that had fallen into the

public domain. Many, like Random Records and Ultrapop, combined their

production of new recordings by local artists with licensing agreements for the

distribution of albums by foreign artists in Argentina. Some companies had ventured

into digital distribution through the Internet, with EPSA Music going as far as

creating their own digital music service and website (zapmusica.com). I was told by

Laura Tesoriero, EPSA Music’s president, that while the site received a lot of visits,

actual purchases had thus far been insignificant: ‘A lot of people go to the web site to

look at things, but few actually buy anything’ (Laura Tesoriero, interview, Buenos

Aires, 13 April 2007).

The variety of business models and scales found among the independent labels

selected to participate in BAFIM illustrates some of the complexities and contra-

dictions involved in negotiating the economic and cultural mandates of diversity

discourses. Underlying these contradictions is the key issue of what an independent

record label even is. Indeed, despite the continued salience of ‘independence’ as an

evocative cultural ideology amongst certain groups of (generally rock-centric)

musical producers and consumers (Hesmondhalgh 1998), it is notoriously difficult

to formulate even the most basic generalisations about independent record labels as a

distinct sector within the larger music industry, be it in terms of production and

distribution networks, corporate culture and style, or economic viability and impact

(Lee 1995). This is all the more true in Latin American contexts such as post-crisis

Buenos Aires, where the personal, political, and artistic commitments underlying

much independent music production in the US, the UK, and Europe (including the

‘Do-It-Yourself ’ tropes of access, democratisation and community-building in

opposition to a hegemonic corporate music industry) are understood and applied

within sometimes radically different historical contexts and artistic narratives, if they

are drawn upon at all (see Vila 1987, 1989).

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Even so, it is perhaps not surprising that many directors of independent labels in

Buenos Aires, some of which had been in operation for as many as 20 years without

any previous outside assistance, chafed at the city government’s recent mobilisation

of the sector as a newly privileged engine of cultural diversity. Some of this unease

was focused on the ambiguity of the term ‘independent’ and the particular values

with which the city government invested it in the development and implementation

of their new cultural policies. As Javier Tenenbaum, the director of the independent

label Los Anos Luz, observed:

The word ‘independent’ does not define very much. The only thing it really means

is that a label is not part of a bigger corporation. It does not define a specific

cultural politics or designate a certain road to follow. None of that. Independent,

beyond what they call indie rock or whatever, simply means that the label is not a

‘major’, it is not a multinational; that it does not belong to a corporation or a media

group. That’s it. It is a definition in and of itself. It does not mean that

independents support culture or whatever. Not at all. Not here, not anywhere.

(Javier Tenenbaum, interview, Buenos Aires, 21 March 2007)

This statement, rather than denying the cultural value of the work done by

independent labels, stands as an irreverent rebuttal to the city government’s particular

vision of cultural diversity, which*in its pursuit of more and different musical

content*appeared to have become nearly indifferent to whatever aesthetic or artistic

values that content might represent for its producers and consumers. At the same

time, Tenenbaum’s observation regarding the generic nature of the term ‘indepen-

dent’ highlights the crucial point that governmental support for independent record

labels was not, and (at least theoretically) could not be, directed towards a certain

type of culture; that is, specific genres that could be conflated as national musics and

the independent labels that championed them. This, in turn, mirrors a larger shift

from the state’s historical role as protector and promoter of a national culture10 to its

contemporary preoccupation with the management and cultivation of a ‘cultural

nation’ or, in this case, a ‘creative city’ (Landry 2000), where the value of culture is

measured in the sheer diversity of cultural forms and practices regardless of form or

content.

This is perhaps the key transformation enacted by the mobilisation of diversity

discourses in contexts such as post-crisis Buenos Aires, the effects of which can be

observed far beyond BAFIM. As Dr Gustavo Lopez, the former Secretary of Culture

for the city government of Buenos Aires and a principal intellectual architect of post-

crisis cultural policy, explained:

The state ought to promote, it ought to protect, it ought to guard [cultural]

patrimony in order to preserve it over the passage of time . . . because beyond the

fact that culture generates income, that it is an industry, it also represents and

symbolises intangible questions of a society . . . but without directing it*and this is

really distinct. The state should not say what should or should not be done. Instead,

the state should promote whatever it is that is there. There should not be an official

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culture. What there ought to be is a state helping the development of culture,

encouraging it. (Dr Gustavo Lopez, interview, Buenos Aires, 12 July 2007)

While Dr Lopez’s vision of the state’s role in the cultural sphere might seem like

second nature to observers familiar with any number of contexts in the global north,

especially the US*where a near vacuum of explicit cultural policy-making is paired

with elaborate legalistic support mechanisms for the domestic cultural industries,

particularly the now global Hollywood film industry (Miller et al. 2005)*this

position nevertheless represents a striking departure from previous traditions of

Argentine cultural policy-making. It is also something of an idealisation. Diversity

discourses have greatly expanded the scope and range of cultural practices deemed

valuable by the city government of Buenos Aires and worthy of its support, as seen in

the wide variety of musical genres featured at BAFIM beyond the so-called national

genres of tango and/or Western art music (see Luker 2007). In practice, however, and

as we have already seen, the state does not really support the development of

‘whatever it is that is there’ in equal fashion, or at least does not distribute its

‘encouragement’ entirely outside any predetermined criteria. Indeed, while diversity

discourses (theoretically) drain aesthetic considerations from the distribution of state

support for culture, they substitute a rather rigorous set of managerial best

practices*evidenced in the selection process for independent record labels that

participated in BAFIM*as the new measure of worthiness. This change in evaluative

criteria has been disorientating for many traditionally-minded cultural policy-makers

in Buenos Aires and beyond, although it is entirely appropriate for a model of state

intervention that prioritises the value of culture over cultural value, starting from the

premise*as Dr Lopez does here*that culture is necessarily an industry.

Taking a step back, then, we can see that BAFIM was structured to achieve the city

government’s twin goals of using diversity to enhance both the cultural value (more

and different content) and economic value (more and different sales) of the local

music industry, especially independent record labels. Independent record labels

played a key role in achieving these and other goals because the diversity of content

they produced and their diversity as a sector were believed to make significant

contributions to both the economic and the cultural life of the city. There was a

certain political register to these projects in that, unlike the so-called major or

multinational record labels, the money-independent labels made in Argentina stayed

in Argentina.

This was a point of nationalistic pride for many Argentine cultural producers,

especially following the disaster of the economic crisis, during which international

economic interests were widely perceived to have been given priority over local needs.

This sentiment was expressed by Victor Ponieman, director of Random Records:

The multinationals are not interested in culture. They are interested in business.

And the truth is that we [the independents] are not interested in culture either. We

are also interested in business. The difference is that if I live in Argentina and work

with culture in Argentina the money that I earn stays in Argentina. But with

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Sony-BMG, for example, the money that they develop with culture goes directly to

London. (Victor Ponieman, interview, Buenos Aires, 12 March 2007)

It is of course crucial to recognise, as Paul du Gay and others have shown (Du Gay

1998; Du Gay and Pryke 2002), that every actor working within the cultural economy

operates as both a cultural and an economic entity, such that it is impossible to claim

that any one actor is more or less ‘interested’ in either aspect of these activities. But

however cliched Ponieman’s discursive self-representation might sound to outside

ears, and however inaccurate the surface of this statement might be,11 the sentiment

behind it was very real, and served as a motivating factor for a wide variety of cultural

production in post-crisis Argentina. However, most of those committed to the

particular logic of diversity discourses ultimately believed that the participation of the

multinational record labels in events like BAFIM and in the musical life of the city

more broadly represented a further diversification of the music sector as a whole, and

was therefore taken to be a good thing. Indeed, the presence of all the multinational

labels at BAFIM was considered a key component of the fair’s overall success by most

of the industry figures who participated in it, not only the governmental managers.

So, despite the politicised inclinations of certain cultural producers, the types of

cultural and/or economic practices called forth by diversity discourses and cultivated

through events like BAFIM do not represent real alternatives to the grossly imbalanced

power relationships that continue to characterise the international music industry.

Rather than serving as a rallying cry around which a more just system of economic and/

or cultural exchange could potentially coalesce, diversity discourses*like the broader

development discourses to which they are intimately linked (Escobar 1995)*operate as

something of an ‘anti-politics machine’ (Ferguson 1990), obscuring the entrenched

power imbalances they are ostensibly designed to address. And unlike commitments to

diversity in a variety of other Latin American political contexts, here diversity is entirely

divorced from any inherent connection to indigeneity, ethnicity, or race, and thereby

from the claims of the new social movements that have emerged from and represent

those groups (Assies and Joekema 1998).

This is not to deny that the reformulation of musical practice, cultural policy, and

the cultural industries enacted by diversity discourses has opened many new and very

real windows of opportunity for cultural producers in Argentina and elsewhere,

especially when framed within the dual trends of expanding digitisation and media

conglomeration that typify the new media (Hesmondhalgh 2002). While diversity

discourses might transform the nuanced multiplicity of local musics and musical

histories into the generic category of ‘world music’, the creative misunderstandings

symbolised by such slippages represent new spaces in which a variety of actors, both

local and global, can make newly productive cultural and economic moves. Indeed,

when managed ‘properly’, diversity can operate as more than a catalyst for the

production of other values and begin to take on value in its own right. One therefore

might expect that new actors*neither independent nor major*would emerge to

capitalise on this potential.

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One such entity is The Orchard, a US-based digital media company that specialises

in the distribution, marketing, and ‘creative licensing’ of independently produced

music, video, and other new media to online content providers or other cultural

producers such as filmmakers or advertising agencies. The company has distribution

contracts with hundreds of independent record labels from more than 70 different

countries, which together represent more than 14,000 artists and a catalogue of more

than a million songs. The Orchard’s founder, Richard Gottehrer*a music industry

veteran with credentials that include founding Sire Records, producing recordings by

groups like Blondie, and writing the songs ‘I Want Candy’ and ‘My Boyfriend’s

Back’*was an international VIP guest at BAFIM.

For the Argentine independent labels that have chosen to work with the company,

The Orchard operates as an online distribution and marketing subcontractor, helping

those labels gain entry to certain kinds of markets to which they would otherwise

have had limited or no access, despite governmental efforts to expand international

audiences for physical CDs. Indeed, The Orchard and other digital distribution

companies like it (such as IODA, CD Baby and Route Note) have emerged as key

intermediaries for independent musical producers as they negotiate the new

technological and structural landscape of the global music industry. While the

development of digital distribution technologies has enabled the catalogues of

independent labels to circulate much more widely with much less investment than

before, partnering with a company like The Orchard is still an appealing prospect for

many independent labels because navigating the logistic and legalistic dimensions of

international digital distribution and marketing requires a specialised expertise (and

many, many hours of work) that are still beyond the scope of all but the most robust

independent labels.

At the same time, working with The Orchard also allows these labels and the artists

in their catalogues to reach a truly international audience without the intervention of

the aesthetic gatekeepers that have dominated the world music industry since its

inception (Feld 1994; Taylor 1997).12 Laura Tesoriero, president of EPSA Music, the

first Argentine independent label to distribute their work through The Orchard and

one of their principal advocates at BAFIM, observed:

Today, with digital distribution, the music that is made [in Argentina] is not so faraway from other places. Through The Orchard, for example, our music can beanywhere in the world very quickly, and you do not have to have a minimumvolume of sales like it was before. In the physical world, only the most importantindependent labels, the ones who invested the most . . . had any kind of impact atthe international level . . . But with this kind of arrangement, all the independentlabels in Argentina, through The Orchard in this case, can find that their cataloguesare available here and, for instance, in France, and that they have reached Frenchaudiences without cost, without having to invest in shipping, in finding adistributor there, in having five discs in the racks of one hundred different recordstores . . . So if you ask if this is a good thing for independents, the answer is yes, itis wonderful. It opens an enormous world to us, a world in which themultinationals already operated fluently because they have offices in different

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countries to deal with precisely these issues. (Laura Tesoriero, interview, Buenos

Aires, 13 April 2007)

Within a year after the fair, 11 of the 35 independent labels that had a stand at BAFIM

had reached agreements with The Orchard to have their catalogues digitally

distributed by the company. As of this writing (January 2010), four additional labels

were working with The Orchard while four others were having their work distributed

by competing companies.

For The Orchard, however, the real money in these arrangements does not come

from digital sales but from the myriad and multiplying opportunities for generating

income based on licensing musical content across media platforms. Coupling their

distribution and marketing services with additional accounting, royalty collection,

and international publishing administration services, The Orchard also specialises in

connecting non-musical companies and services with musical content through what

they call brand campaigns and ‘creative licensing’ agreements. For their branding

campaigns, the company ‘harnesses the unique power of digital music (and video) for

brands, driving brand definition and recognition to attract and retain customers’.13

Their creative licensing service, on the other hand, assists visual media producers

with locating and clearing musical material from the company’s vast catalogue for use

in advertising, film, television or other media. These and other services use new

technologies and creative expertise to compound the value of the company’s access to

a hugely diverse catalogue of music by moving elements of that catalogue into diverse

contexts, be they places (from Argentina to elsewhere in the world) or media (such as

advertising, movies or videogames).

For The Orchard, more content means more diversity, and more diversity means

more value. And as I saw while accompanying Mr Gottehrer at BAFIM, no addition

to the company’s catalogue was too small. As we were making our way through the

stands, killing time between business meetings, a young Argentine man with a

scraggly beard and a Bolivian-style knit hat passed by us, handing us a few sheets of

roughly photocopied paper he peeled from the top of a short stack he had cradled in

his arm. He passed us the papers and moved on without a word of explanation. ‘What

is this?’ Richard asked me, squinting at the page. I translated for him. It was the

catalogue of a home-grown record label, something either too small or too

unorganised to have a proper stand at the fair. There were three or four titles listed

on the page, accompanied by short descriptions. ‘Do you think we have this?’, Richard

asked. ‘I doubt it’, I said, ‘this looks really underground’. ‘We should get it,’ he replied,

‘We can always use more stuff ’.

While any potential deal between The Orchard and the man with the home-grown

record label would almost certainly be an economically beneficial situation for both

parties, this moment also speaks to some of the broader consequences of diversity

discourses and demonstrates how power operates in contexts structured by them. The

institutionalisation of diversity, while a crucial tool for enabling the protection,

promotion, and development of the cultural industries in cities like Buenos Aires,

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tends to flatten out and even erase real difference, transforming however many

cultural, economic, or political claims into that much more ‘stuff ’. At the same time,

it is also plainly evident that diversity, in and of itself, is not a democratising

paradigm, and that it will never be until it can adequately acknowledge, account for,

and address the very real value(s) of those sectors who, in their continuing non-

recognition, remain marked as culturally dangerous and are thereby excluded.

The Unmanageable: Diversity and its Discontents in Post-crisis Buenos Aires

Despite the city government of Buenos Aires’ seemingly wholehearted embrace of

diversity discourses, in practice the city continued to privilege certain kinds of

diversity while glossing over others*rendering them invisible, if not excluding them

altogether. In the case of BAFIM, the most striking example of this was the complete

absence of cumbia, a highly controversial musical genre that was without doubt the

most popular music in urban Argentina at the time of my fieldwork. A sub-genre

known as cumbia villera (‘slum cumbia’) has been especially polemic, causing moral

panics among mainstream Argentine audiences akin to the initial reactions many US

audiences had in the late 1980s to ‘gangsta rap’ (Quinn 2004), with which cumbia

shares lyrical themes of delinquency, police persecution, poverty, a highly mis-

ogynistic representation of women, and the consumption and trafficking of drugs

and alcohol, among others (Vila and Seman 2007). Decried by critics from both the

right and the left, cumbia villera now tends to be taken as a product and symbol of the

deep social, economic, and cultural divisions that have become typical of neoliberal

Argentina (see Cragnolini 2006).

Regardless of these polemics, however, cumbia villera and the larger genre with

which it is associated have vast audiences in Argentina. According to a 2004

nationwide study of musical preferences conducted by the federal government’s

Secretary of Media, a full 50% of those surveyed declared cumbia to be among their

preferred genres, following only folklore (59.7%) and rock (57%) (Palmeiro 2004,

55). It is difficult to know exactly how these generic preferences map onto actual

sales, because the Argentine Chamber of Phonographic Industry Producers compiles

its data according to much broader categories. Still, in 2005 ‘local’ music*that is,

Argentine music produced by any label and from any genre except ‘classical’*accounted for a full 46% of legitimate record sales in Argentina, significantly more

than any other category (Observatorio de Industrias Culturales de la Ciudad de

Buenos Aires 2006, 112). Given those sales figures and listeners’ declared preferences,

we can assume that cumbia, despite its deep complexity as a musical and social

phenomenon, accounted for a significant percentage of local music sales.

Why, then, was cumbia not included in BAFIM, a fair that was ostensibly about

fostering the diversity and economic potential of the local music industry as a whole

outside any specific aesthetic criteria and without adherence to a hierarchy of genres?

Nicolas Wainszelbaum answered this question:

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Cumbia is a genre that is not programmed by the city [government]. It is extremelypopular; it is the most popular of all the genres*like Michael Jackson or Madonnain the US, that is cumbia here*but it is not programmed. They don’t programmeit. They don’t promote it. Why? Because of the people who would come. Because ofprejudice. Maybe because the city government still has a conception of culture inwhich the popular does not have a place. (Nicolas Wainszelbaum, interview,Buenos Aires, 12 December 2006)

‘The popular’, then, is the unmanageable; the space where the largely celebratory

deployment of diversity discourses on the part of certain governmental officials and

programmes runs aground upon institutional ideologies within the city government

of Buenos Aires (and Argentine culture more broadly) that continue to privilege

historically entrenched cultural hierarchies and subject positions over a truly

pluralistic diversity, despite the economic potential that genres like cumbia would

represent if they were included in events like BAFIM.14

It is no coincidence that the popular marks the practicable limit of diversity

discourses in Buenos Aires, as readily admitted by governmental functionaries such as

Wainszelbaum. As it is used here, the popular points to a complex amalgamation of

longstanding racial, ethnic, gender, and especially class differences and prejudices,

each of which has a specific genealogy within Argentina and other Latin American

contexts (Grimson and Jelin 2006; Wade 1997). At the same time, and as is reflected

in English language concerns with the term (Bennett 1986; Hall 1981), the popular

points less to overt discrimination based on racial, ethnic, gendered, or class

differences than it does to the social logic of systematic inequalities that are largely

defined by patterns of cultural production and consumption. As Garcıa Canclini

notes:

The popular is the excluded: those who have no patrimony or who do not succeedin being acknowledged and conserved; artisans who do not become artists, who donot become individuals or participate in the market for ‘legitimate’ symbolic goods;spectators of the mass media who remain outside the universities and museums,‘incapable’ of reading and looking at high culture because they do not know thehistory of knowledge and styles. (Garcıa Canclini 1995, 145)

Popular genres such as cumbia were excluded from BAFIM and other governmental

productions, then, not because the genre represented a radical alterity that diversity

discourses were incapable of accounting for, but because the production and

consumption of cumbia exceeded the broad but nonetheless limited range of cultural

participation that the city government considered supportable. Thus, despite the

seemingly wholesale endorsement of diversity discourses as a foundational premise of

post-crisis cultural policy-making, the city government of Buenos Aires remains

deeply invested in maintaining a coherent (if contested) division between ‘proper’

and ‘improper’ modes of citizenship within the city.

Cultural policy remains at the centre of such efforts because it is through the

consumption of city-produced cultural events such as BAFIM (and many others) that

a viable approximation of the historically hegemonic middle-class subject has been

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cultivated and maintained in post-crisis Argentina. Indeed, cultural consumption has

played a crucial role in buttressing what Beatriz Sarlo has identified as the core triad

of Argentina’s ideological exceptionalism vis-a-vis its Latin American neighbours*namely, literacy through universal education, universal claims to the privileges of

citizenship, and access to upward mobility through work and job security*each of

which was profoundly undermined by the ruptures of the 2001 economic crisis and

the broader neoliberal experiment of the 1990s (Sarlo 2001). Maintaining this

idealised image of the middle-class citizen as cultural consumer was considered

politically significant not only because it played a role in negotiating profound

transformations in Argentine identifications following the 2001 crisis, but because

this (and only this) middle-class political subjectivity was considered capable of

serving as the foundation of a viable public sphere. Such a public sphere, at the most

basic (and perhaps cynical) level, could serve as a generator of votes for a given

administration within the city government, as any number of city officials described

to me in our conversations. More importantly, however, it could also serve as the

necessary political and ideological counterpart to the functional democratic state

apparatus as such. This was a serious concern, given that less than 25 years had passed

since the end of the last Argentine military dictatorship (1976�83) at the time of my

fieldwork, and that the country had undergone an unprecedented period of political

instability during and following the 2001 economic crisis, rapidly cycling through

some four presidents in a matter of weeks (Blustein 2005).

There are, of course, several profound contradictions in this situation, not least of

which was that in the years immediately following the economic crisis Argentina’s

historic middle class could no longer be meaningfully identified by their economic

position. More relevant, however, is the fact that this ostensibly democratic public

sphere, constituted in part through its consumption of free and open but also

unevenly distributed and variously accessible public cultural spectacles, including

BAFIM, was in fact deeply undemocratic. As recognised by everyone from the

academic critics of the Habermasian public sphere (for example, Roberts and Crossly

2004) to specific individuals and groups operating both inside and outside the city

government, any and every public sphere is necessarily circumscribed by broader

patterns of inclusion and exclusion. In the case of government-produced musical

events such as BAFIM, those excluded were, on the one hand, the true elite (who, in

the words of one of my governmental interlocutors, ‘had other means of entertaining

themselves’), and, on the other, the complexly disenfranchised ‘popular’ classes. The

latter group has historically constituted the vast majority of citizens in Argentina*where voting is compulsory*but whose claims on the recourses of citizenship have

generally been denied due to institutional limitations and broader social prejudices

(Auyero 2000; see also Lomnitz 2001 on Mexico).

Such exclusions have only been exacerbated by the spectacular series of failures on

the part of international political�economic ideologies that have successively

intended to develop, modernise, integrate, or globalise Latin American economies,

political policies and cultures. Far from achieving their stated goals, these policies

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have succeeded only in compounding exclusions of all sorts*from economic

opportunity, social integration, political participation or cultural legitimacy*to

the point that the region as a whole has been mired in what has been identified as a

more or less permanent state of crisis (Yudice, Flores, and Franco 1992; Richard 2004;

Grimson 2004). Within this context, the popular as such has come to operate as a key

component of Latin American politics (Laclau 2005), social movements (Eckstein

2001; Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998), culture (Mıguez and Seman 2006), the

arts, and, of course, musica popular. Indeed, these patterns of political and social

exclusion map directly onto musical concerns and experiences, such that socially

‘popular’ genres such as cumbia have been left out of the city government’s cultural

policy efforts in BAFIM and beyond. Such exclusions are, arguably, the Achilles heel

of much cultural policy discourse that promotes the cultural industries or the creative

economy as real alternatives for post-industrial and/or underdeveloped cities

worldwide (for example, Florida 2002), and have serious implications for the

positions staked out by ethnomusicologists regarding these issues.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the many policy-makers, city government employees,

music industry figures, journalists, musicians and others who generously gave their

time and attention to this project, and whose experiences and perspectives have had a

profound influence on my consideration of these activities. The author would

especially like to thank Nicolas Wainszelbaum, Augustina Peretti, and Stella Puente

for enabling to participate in BAFIM and for helping to facilitate later contacts with

other participants and policy-makers.

The Department of Music at Columbia University supported this research in

Buenos Aires both intellectually and financially, and the author would like to express

gratitude to that institution for its tremendous generosity over the course of studies

there. A preliminary period of fieldwork for the larger research project of which the

material presented here is a part was made possible by a Foreign Language and Area

Studies Summer Fellowship.

Elements of this project were presented at a number of conferences and

colloquia, including the annual meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology (2007)

and 2008), the British Forum for Ethnomusicology One Day Conference (2007), and

the School of Music Colloquium Series at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

(2009). The author would like to thank the organisers of these events for giving the

opportunity to discuss his work in public, and also thank those participants who

provided feedback on ideas as they were developing.

Stephen Cottrell’s patient and precise editorial work made taking the piece from

its first to its final draft a real pleasure; incorporating the comments from two

anonymous readers at Ethnomusicology Forum made the essay much stronger. The

author would also like to thank Ana Marıa Ochoa, David Novak, Farzaneh Hemmasi,

and other friends and colleagues for their critical feedback on the manuscript as it

was in process. Finally, the author dedicates the piece to wife and companion, Ruth

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Wikler-Luker, who has been intellectually and emotionally with the author every step

of the way.

Notes

[1] Formed in 2003, the Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries was, at the time of my fieldwork,

organised around several broad programmes, including General Directorates of Cultural

Industries and Design (including programmes that concentrated specifically on the

publishing, music, and general design industries), Promotion and Exportation of Cultural

Goods, and the city’s Cultural Industries Observatory, among others. The formation of the

Sub-Secretariat of Cultural Industries reflected the new priority the city government had

given the cultural industries as an engine of economic development following the 2001

economic crisis, and spoke to the kind of contribution the government expected the sector to

make to the city’s economy in the coming years.

[2] See, for instance, Cloonan (2007) and Breen (2008) in popular music studies; Bennett et al.

(1993) and Lewis and Miller (2002) in critical cultural policy studies; and Throsby (2001) in

cultural economics.

[3] Available from www.discograficas.gov.ar (last accessed January 11, 2010).

[4] All interviews cited were conducted in Spanish and translated by the author.

[5] The city government is by far the largest producer of cultural events taking place in Buenos

Aires. In 2006, for instance, it produced more than 1500 mostly free performances

throughout its network of city-owned venues (Ministerio de Cultura 2007).

[6] Indeed, local law 2264, which provides tax incentives for private contributions to cultural

activities in Buenos Aires, was approved by the city legislature only in December 2006, and

was intended to become effective as of March 2008. It was the first formal effort to encourage

private support of culture on the part of any Argentine Government*local, provincial, or

national.

[7] These artists included, among others: David Bolzoni, a rock-pop singer who performed the

song used as the theme music for the 2006 hit Argentine telenovela (Latin American soap

opera) ‘Montecristo’; Abel Pintos, a young folklore singer; Litto Nebbia, a guitarist and

record producer who gained fame in the 1960s as a member of the first Spanish-language

rock group in Argentina; Adrian Iaies, a modern jazz pianist and composer; El Arranque, a

prominent contemporary tango ensemble; Azafata, an alternative pop�rock group that

performed in flamboyant outfits and face paint reminiscent of the American rock group

KISS; and Fabiana Cantilo, a veteran rock nacional singer who has performed with such

figures as Charly Garcıa and Fito Paez.

[8] Pairings included: alternative pop polyglot Axel Krygier with Juana Molina, an ex-child

comedy actress turned electronic musician and singer; experimental jazz group Gordoloco

Trıo with rock guitarist Ariel Minimal; veteran tango guitarist Esteban Morgado with pianist

and composer Leo Sujatovich (who have since continued to perform together on occasion);

and local ska/reggae group Satelite Kingston with acoustic pop singer/songwriter Rubin.

[9] Depending on the location from which it is heard, for example, a given performance could

simultaneously and coherently operate as: a hit song with heavy rotation on local radio

stations; the royalty-generating and career-boosting theme song of a hit telenovela; a

business-defining highlight of an independent record label’s catalogue; a digital file available

for download and purchase almost anywhere; a blip on Billboard magazine’s ‘world music’

charts; the torch-bearing proof that the canonised tradition of Argentine rock music, whose

history spans several decades, will continue; the breakthrough success story that inspires

other artists to continue recording and performing their original music in the face of

economic and artistic adversities; a point of pride (or derision) for local listeners; a not

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insignificant source of tax revenue for the city government; the barometer of a carefully

managed milieu of local music-making that is beginning to pay cultural dividends; the

keystone event for governmental public performance programmes; perhaps even intangible

heritage.

[10] A ‘national culture’ here implies one in which cultural values are believed to be embodied by

specific forms of heritage, tradition, and/or national expressions; see Vianna (1999), Moore

(1997), Wade (2000), and McCann (2004) on different Latin American musical contexts.

[11] The money Sony-BMG*now Sony Music Entertainment*makes in Argentina in fact goes

straight to New York City, where its international headquarters are located.

[12] There is, of course, a certain threshold of professionalism that an independent label would

have to achieve in order to be able to partner with a company like The Orchard; hence some

of the city government’s concern with professional capacity-building. But because The

Orchard works directly with independent labels rather than individual artists or groups, the

company is not involved in the kinds of aesthetic decision-making typical of world music

production in the global north.

[13] Available from www.theorchard.com (last accessed January 11, 2010). These campaigns are

not about facilitating musical or artistic endorsements, in which a corporation would aim to

forge productive associations between itself and a certain genre, song, or artist in the minds

of its consumers. Rather, they provide client companies with content and delivery methods

for musical campaigns or advertising events, such as a recent programme in which

consumers could download musical ringtones for their mobile phones using codes found on

canisters of Pringles potato chips.

[14] Whether the producers and consumers of cumbia would want to participate in government

sponsored events of this type is, of course, an altogether different question.

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