Selling Digital Music, Formatting CultureSelling Digital Music, Formatting Culture documents the transition of recorded music on CDs to music as digital files on computers. More than two decades after the first digital music files began circulating in online archives and playing through new software media players, we have yet to fully internalize the cultural and aesthetic consequences of these shifts. Tracing the emergence of what Jeremy Wade Morris calls the Òdigital music commodity,Ó Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture considers how a conflicted assemblage of technologies, users, and industries helped reformat popular musicÕs meanings and uses. Through case studies of five key technologiesÑWinamp, metadata, Napster, iTunes, and cloud computingÑthis book explores how music listeners gradually came to understand computers and digital files as suitable replacements for their stereos and CD. Morris connects industrial production, popular culture, technology, and commerce in a narrative involving the aesthetics of music and computers, and the labor of producers and everyday users, as well as the value that listeners make and take from digital objects and cultural goods. Above all, Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture is a sounding out of musicÕs encounters with the interfaces, metadata, and algorithms of digital culture and of why the shifting form of the music commodity matters for the music and other media we love. |
Contents
Music as a Digital File | 30 |
Making Technology Behave | 66 |
This Business of Napster | 94 |
Music in Digital Stores | 131 |
Music in the Cloud | 166 |
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Common terms and phrases
album Apple Apple's artists audience audio Burkart business model CD-Text CDDB CDDB and ID3 circulation cloud computing cloud-based services commodification commodity community commodity form companies consumers create cultural commodities database devices digital commodities digital files digital music commodity digital music files digital objects digital rights management disc distribution economic embedded everyday fans file sharing file-sharing formats Gracenote hardware ID3 tags interact interface Internet iPod iTunes Music Store iTunes Store kind labor launch libraries listeners manage McCourt media player metadata micromaterials modity multimedia music industries music on computers music retail music services Napster Napster users Nullsoft ownership packaging paratexts play playlists purchase radio Radiohead re-tuning record labels recorded music RIAA SightSound Skeletal Lamping Skeuomorphs social songs sound Spotify streaming tech technical technologies tion track visual Winamp