"Music is not a commodity, it's a resource"
About this Quote
“Music is not a commodity, it’s a resource” is a line that sounds simple until you feel how hard it leans against the machinery of modern culture. A commodity is something you buy, own, fence off, and flip. A resource is something you draw from, share, and replenish. Michelle Shocked frames music less like a product on a shelf and more like water in a public system: essential, circulating, shaped by access.
The intent reads as a rebuke to an industry that treats songs as inventory and artists as content pipelines. Coming from a working musician, it’s not abstract theory; it’s an argument about power. If music is a commodity, gatekeepers get to decide its price, who touches it, and how its value is measured (sales, streams, licensing). If music is a resource, the metric shifts to use: what it does in people’s lives, how it builds scenes, how it carries memory, how it gives language to feelings you can’t invoice.
The subtext is also about labor and ownership. Shocked isn’t denying that musicians need to get paid; she’s warning that monetization can become a colonization of culture itself. The phrase implicitly critiques copyright maximalism, platform economics that flatten songs into background noise, and the way “exposure” gets offered as payment while someone else harvests the real value.
Context matters: Shocked emerged from folk and protest traditions where songs travel, mutate, and belong to communities as much as to catalogs. Her line defends music as a commons that keeps generating meaning the more people draw from it, not less.
The intent reads as a rebuke to an industry that treats songs as inventory and artists as content pipelines. Coming from a working musician, it’s not abstract theory; it’s an argument about power. If music is a commodity, gatekeepers get to decide its price, who touches it, and how its value is measured (sales, streams, licensing). If music is a resource, the metric shifts to use: what it does in people’s lives, how it builds scenes, how it carries memory, how it gives language to feelings you can’t invoice.
The subtext is also about labor and ownership. Shocked isn’t denying that musicians need to get paid; she’s warning that monetization can become a colonization of culture itself. The phrase implicitly critiques copyright maximalism, platform economics that flatten songs into background noise, and the way “exposure” gets offered as payment while someone else harvests the real value.
Context matters: Shocked emerged from folk and protest traditions where songs travel, mutate, and belong to communities as much as to catalogs. Her line defends music as a commons that keeps generating meaning the more people draw from it, not less.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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