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concerts, and she replied that aside from a handful of posters near the university, the group members simply sent out mass mobile phone SMSs to their friends, who forwarded it to their friends, and so forth. These means gamered an audience of several hundred people. Mgzavrebi did not have a record contract and was in the process of recording a demo CD, yet I heard their songs played morę than those of any other local band on celi phones all over the city. Even though they had yet to enter a studio, someone had taped their songs and people were sharing it. I found homemade videos for their songs on YouTube and Georgian downloading sites; the band even had one such video for the song “Mtvare” (Moon) on their MySpace homepage. In fact, Nini Dedalamazishvili complained to me that the widespread prevalence of taping and sharing their musie hurt their chances of working out an arrangement to broadcast their musie on a local television station, which was the reason why they were paying out of their own pocket to record an album and to create entirely new videos. Somehow, their musie was getting to their audience prior to the intervention of a record company or the mass media.

The Missing Scaffolding: Where is the Musie Industry?

During my fieldwork in Tbilisi, a persistent question kept showing up in different guises in many of the places where I worked: why was it that despite the fact that the Georgian economy is stronger than it has ever been sińce the collapse of the Soviet Union^{1 2} and corruption is the least it has ever been {WorldBank 2012), the musie industry has disappeared? In order to address this ąuestion, it is necessary to backtrack a bit and discuss what the purpose of a musie industry is, what it consists of, and what it does. The function of a musie industry is to produce musie and then to get it to consumers, thereby generating profits. Producing musie

1

According to the CIA World Factbook. the GDP per person in 2011 was $5,400, while in 2000 it was $2,300.

2