Search

The paper reviews the "celestial jukebox" model of digital music distribution in light of its recent transformation into "cloud"-based music services. Elaborating on a prior history of the celestial jukebox business model, the paper identifies continuities with services built around music portals, updates the legal and business strategies of the most popular cloud-based services, compares core functionalities of cloud-based services, and discusses the cultural significance of an international youth movement opposed to the celestial jukebox under various national "pirate parties." It speculates that the pirate parties envision counter-reforms to global information policy that are culturally environmentalist in their worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Tori Amos's Original Bootlegs as a case study, this paper considers the impact of the introduction of an extensive collection of “official” bootlegs in relation to debates around fan communities, music sharing, and genre. Amos's strategic adoption of the term “bootleg” and the strategies employed to market her official bootlegs to the Toriphile fan community work to blur the boundary between the value of the “authentic” and mass-produced music releases. Additionally, the Original Bootlegs contribute to the music industry's discursive and material cooptation of the term “bootleg.” By choosing to call these releases “bootlegs” Amos ultimately undermines—and in the process destabilizes—the bootleg as a genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical evaluations of audio mash-ups and remixes tend to congregate around two poles. On the one hand, these often clever re-combinations of recorded music are celebrated as innovative and creative interventions in the material of bland commodity culture. On the other hand, they are often reviled as derivative, inauthentic, and illegal because they do nothing more than appropriate and reconfigure the intellectual property of others. This essay does not side with either position but identifies and critiques the common understanding and fundamental assumptions that make these two, opposed positions possible in the first place. The investigation of this matter is divided into two main parts. The first considers the traditional understanding of technologically enabled reproduction and the often unquestioned value it invests in the concept of originality. It does so by beginning with a somewhat unlikely source, Plato's Phaedrus—a dialogue that, it is argued, articulates the original concept of originality that both determines and is reproduced in the theories and practices of sound recording. The second part of the essay demonstrates how the audio mash-up deliberately intervenes in this tradition, advancing a fundamental challenge to the original understanding and privilege of originality. In making this argument, however, the essay does not endeavor to position the mash-up as anything unique or innovative. Instead, it demonstrates how mash-ups, true to their thoroughly derivative nature, plunder, reuse, and remix anomalies that are already available in and constitutive of recorded music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the impact of the Napster music Web site on the identities of both artists and Napster users. Historical background on Internet music distribution; Discussion on the impact of Napster on artists as an archetype, using the theories of authorship developed by both Mark Rose and Michel Foucault; Overview of the music industry's rhetoric of file swapping.

Discusses in detail the politics of piracy, poverty, and greed in a globalized music market. Extent of music piracy in the U.S., Mexico and the rest of Latin and South America; Anti-piracy laws successfully lobbied by the sound recording industry in the U.S.; Comparison of the costs of pirated music to original copy music recordings.