Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture

Selling Digital Music 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. Exploring the emergence of what Morris calls the digital music commodity,Selling Digital Music considers how a conflicted assemblage of technologies, users, and industries helped reformat popular music’s meanings and uses. Through case studies of five key technologiesWinamp, metadata, Napster, iTunes, and cloud computingMorris questions how music listeners gradually came to understand computers and digital files as suitable replacements for their stereos and CD. The digitization of the music commodity 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 is a sounding out of music’s encounters with the interfaces, metadata, and algorithms of digital culture and why the shifting form of the musical commodity matters for the music and other media we love.

Jeremy Wade Morris is Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published inNew Media & Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, First Monday, and various edited collections on music and technology.