Music, radio and the record business in Zimbabwe today

Extract

Radio and the recording business have, since the beginning of the last century, had a profound impact upon existing musical life whenever and wherever they have decisively and irreversibly established themselves. Their arrival restructures and redefines the social relations of music in many aspects of its production, performance and reception. Radio and recording technologies have had a significant impact on the livelihoods of all those who one way or another try to make a living from music (composers, performers and - in Europe - publishers, for instance). Performance itself is transformed as new norms are set in place which call for new levels of technique and interpretation. Finally the conditions of musical reception are reconfigured and new `taste publics' emerge, potentially in conflict with each other, as musical life is totalised into a new and complex unity.