Changes

by Clinton Sandvick

When most of us think about music piracy we focus on Napster and Bit Torrent, but music piracy is nothing new. Alex Sayf Cummings explores the history of music piracy during the 20th Century in his book Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2013). Alex Sayf Cummings is an assistant professor of History at Georgia State University. His work has appeared in the Journal of American History, Southern Cultures, and Salon, among other publications, and he is the co-editor of the blog Tropics of Meta. He is also the author of Top Ten Media History Booklist.

It’s a bit of a funny story—at least to the extent that a story about a dissertation can be funny. I had gone to grad school with the intention of doing urban history, writing about the landscape, built environment, etc. My goal was to work with Elizabeth Blackmar, who has done a lot of incredible work about space, housing, property rights and so forth. However, in my second year I took a course in the School of Art at Columbia called “Open Source Culture,” and it got me thinking about the issues of copyright and technology that had been causing so much controversy at the time, particularly in terms of file-sharing. So I sort of made a switch from focusing on property in the physical sense of land and buildings to intellectual property.

The question that I found so urgent at the time was: if we are, as is so often said, in an information economy or a knowledge economy, then what happens to that form of capitalism when anyone can copy anything, at any time? This is going to become even more of an issue as 3D printing rapidly evolves—we’ll be copying not just music and books, but sofas and hedge-trimmers before long.

Like any historian, I’m professionally obligated to say, “It’s a combination of a variety of factors, and it was all very complicated.” But honestly, the industry did get lazy, and it was stubborn in resisting new models instead of trying to take advantage of the new possibilities offered by online distribution. This is an industry that never had a good reputation—in America, the perception of the sleazy label ripping off artists is basically encoded into our cultural DNA—and legally harassing twelve-year-olds certainly didn’t help with this image problem. Hey don't look at us. We didn't the wreck the record business.

It’s more than the labels’ folly, though. The role of the label itself is being fundamentally reimagined. Its very purpose as an institution is in question when an artist like Pomplamoose can attain Internet celebrity through homemade YouTube videos and artists can sell their music directly to fans. Labels were essentially gatekeepers, much like commercial radio or music magazines. They checked and channeled the flow of aspiring musicians that reached audiences. A&R reps scouted talent, and labels provided access to recording infrastructure, pressing plants, distribution networks, and promotion. It goes without saying that artists no longer have to go through a label to be able to record, produce, and distribute their music, although labels still have access to networks of influence and distribution that remain valuable.

I suspect it has to do with the fundamental nature of books versus music. As I try to show in the book, music has always had this intensely social nature to it: people go to a concert together, they hear a band and they can’t wait to share it with their friends. This happens with books too, but reading remains this kind of individual experience. Plus, despite the success of e-books, the Kindle, Nook, and so forth, I’d say that there’s still a good deal of inertia in the culture of reading. I’m not an audiophile and it hardly matters to me whether I’m listening to an MP3 or LP, but I do prefer a physical book to an electronic one. I like to come by my back pain honestly. Then again, I know PDF and audiobook versions of my book have circulated widely online, so who knows?

'''Finally, how would recommend using your book in a class? What themes, ideas or historical trends will your book help students understand?'''