The Talent Economy

Abstract This chapter examines two of the strategies used by metropolitan recording companies to capture music and other sound events from Latin America and the Caribbean in the early twentieth century: the recruitment of local and touring performers to make recordings at the companies’ headquarters in the United States and Europe and the acquisition of sheet music to be arranged and recorded by metropolitan musicians. Those sound-capturing episodes, including the ones examined in chapter 2 of this book, are a gateway into discussing the extent to which the global interventions of the music industry at the time can be framed as extractive economies. Along with oil, copper, manganese, nickel, iron, cinchona, rubber, banana, and other natural resources, vernacular musics and the performing ability of local musicians were part of an exploitative scenario that nurtured the industrial and imperial growth of the United States, England, Germany, and France in the early twentieth century. This chapter also frames these operations around music and sound as a talent economy. For metropolitan corporations, talent was a designation for musical labor. Talent was less a vehicle to evaluate musicians’ abilities than a mechanism to produce value.