My essay “Digital Downsizing: The Effects of Digital Music Production on Labor” was recently published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. The preprint version is available without the firewall here. Digital Audio Workstations and Drum Machines increasingly replace highly skilled musician labor.
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I’ve been writing about what I call the piracy panic narrative for a while. The piracy panic narrative goes that file-sharing is piracy, piracy is stealing, and this stealing hurts recording artists. In this simplistic view of the recording industry (constructed by the major record labels), we are bringing about the death of music by file-sharing, ripping CDs, and streaming music. The main problem with this argument being that piracy is not stealing and these activities are not “piracy,” in the first place. However, the recording industry repeatedly makes these claims beginning with Metallica in 2000.
Now Taylor Swift has gotten into the discussion. She states “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.” Continue reading
iTake-Over: The Recording Industry in the Digital Era was released today by Rowman & Littlefield. Be sure to grab your copy. Continue reading
More than a decade after the launch of the iTunes Music Store, parts of the recording 
industry are finally changing the way they calculate sales. Billboard changed the metrics it uses to calculate the Billboard 200. Rather than calculating only album sales, Billboard 200 will now use “track-equivalent albums” and “track-equivalent streams.” This is the biggest change in the way that Billboard calculates this chart since the implementation of SoundScan in 1991, and it already appears to be every bit as monumental. Continue reading
Book decries methods of the recording industry in the digital age – News Center – UT Arlington.
A new book by a UT Arlington assistant professor reveals how large corporations exploited new technologies to maintain their stranglehold on the music industry.
David Arditi, an assistant professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, wrote “iTake-Over: The Recording Industry in the Digital Era,” published by R&L Publishers. It will hit shelves Dec. 5.
iTake-Over 