Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy ─ Problems and Practices for an Emerging Service Industry

The practices that compose the popular music industry have significantly changed in the last ten years, due to new sets of hardware and Internet-driven considerations and practices that less than a decade ago were in their infancy, such as iPods, "bittorrents," and blogs. Critics and celebrants of the new media infrastructure often embrace technological determinist explanations of these changes, which flatten and ignore the complex sets of practices and ideologies that are engaged by users and administrators. This book documents the rise of those new practices that have developed to make the production, distribution, and promotion of music and music-oriented merchandise a more flexible and niche oriented endeavor than before. Anderson discusses what this new industry is becoming, looking at the demise of an "object based" industry and the resulting intellectual property issues, the rise of the "entrepreneurial musician" who is both forced and encouraged to take on many of the services that traditional major label record companies used to provide, and an emergent view that the "audience" is now an "end user" with productive capacities that are also developing new sets of standards and practices that can be capitalized upon by musicians and investors. The significance of these changes is still being discovered and the book will look at these characteristics and how they are shaping a new music industry in music retail and services, financial investment, and asset generation, and the distribution and promotion of musical wares.

Tim J. Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Theater Arts at Old Dominion University, US.