The "Problem" With Musical Production in the Digital Age

Since the development of the first file sharing program, Napster, in 1999, the practice of illegal file sharing, or piracy, has received much, if not all, of the blame from the major recorded music labels for the dramatic decline of recorded music sales over the same period. In the first half of this paper, I investigate whether the industry’s claims are substantive. Based on the fact that the industry’s claims are not only based on unreliable and misleading data, but also ignore multiple other causes and explanations, I determine that the explanation for declining sales based on piracy is without merit. I go on to show that the decline in sales itself is not a concern, not only for the fact that production is nevertheless increasing, and that sales are predicted to rise. Considering these conclusions, I pose the question of why, despite the relatively groundless nature of the piracy claims and the apparently hopeful future for the industry, the major labels have pressed the narrative of piracy as the culprit. Taking into consideration the role that digital markets have played in the sales decline, I argue that the major labels fear that digital distribution allows for greater competition from independent labels and unsigned artists. In order to properly analyze the conditions and future of the recorded music industry, I deconstruct the industry narrative, examining the false assumptions it is based on. I then establish a new narrative, analyzing the technological, social, economic, and institutional parameters of the industry, and the goals of popular music production for both artists and society. I also take into account individuals’ goals for music consumption, based on data taken from a survey of Ohio State undergraduate students. Based on these conditions, I propose a series of alternatives to the current industrial production model and address their potential benefits to both artists and society.No embargoAcademic Major: Comparative Studie

Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet

“Net neutrality,” a dry but crucial standard of openness in network access, began as a technical principle informing obscure policy debates but became the flashpoint for an all-out political battle for the future of communications and culture. Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet is a critical cultural history of net neutrality that reveals how this intentionally “boring” world of internet infrastructure and regulation hides a fascinating and pivotal sphere of power, with lessons for communication and media scholars, activists, and anyone interested in technology and politics. While previous studies and academic discussions of net neutrality have been dominated by legal, economic, and technical perspectives, Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet offers a humanities-based critical theoretical approach, telling the story of how activists and millions of everyday people, online and in the streets, were able to challenge the power of the phone and cable corporations that historically dominated communications policy-making to advance equality and justice in media and technology

A Hybrid Partially Reconfigurable Overlay Supporting Just-In-Time Assembly of Custom Accelerators on FPGAs

The state of the art in design and development flows for FPGAs are not sufficiently mature to allow programmers to implement their applications through traditional software development flows. The stipulation of synthesis as well as the requirement of background knowledge on the FPGAs\u27 low-level physical hardware structure are major challenges that prevent programmers from using FPGAs. The reconfigurable computing community is seeking solutions to raise the level of design abstraction at which programmers must operate, and move the synthesis process out of the programmers\u27 path through the use of overlays. A recent approach, Just-In-Time Assembly (JITA), was proposed that enables hardware accelerators to be assembled at runtime, all from within a traditional software compilation flow. The JITA approach presents a promising path to constructing hardware designs on FPGAs using pre-synthesized parallel programming patterns, but suffers from two major limitations. First, all variant programming patterns must be pre-synthesized. Second, conditional operations are not supported. In this thesis, I present a new reconfigurable overlay, URUK, that overcomes the two limitations imposed by the JITA approach. Similar to the original JITA approach, the proposed URUK overlay allows hardware accelerators to be constructed on FPGAs through software compilation flows. To this basic capability, URUK adds additional support to enable the assembly of presynthesized fine-grained computational operators to be assembled within the FPGA. This thesis provides analysis of URUK from three different perspectives; utilization, performance, and productivity. The analysis includes comparisons against High-Level Synthesis (HLS) and the state of the art approach to creating static overlays. The tradeoffs conclude that URUK can achieve approximately equivalent performance for algebra operations compared to HLS custom accelerators, which are designed with simple experience on FPGAs. Further, URUK shows a high degree of flexibility for runtime placement and routing of the primitive operations. The analysis shows how this flexibility can be leveraged to reduce communication overhead among tiles, compared to traditional static overlays. The results also show URUK can enable software programmers without any hardware skills to create hardware accelerators at productivity levels consistent with software development and compilation

Music 2025 : The Music Data Dilemma: issues facing the music industry in improving data management

© Crown Copyright 2019Music 2025ʼ investigates the infrastructure issues around the management of digital data in an increasingly stream driven industry. The findings are the culmination of over 50 interviews with high profile music industry representatives across the sector and reflects key issues as well as areas of consensus and contrasting views. The findings reveal whilst there are great examples of data initiatives across the value chain, there are opportunities to improve efficiency and interoperability

Music and Digital Media

Anthropology has neglected the study of music. Music and Digital Media shows how and why this should be redressed. It does so by enabling music to expand the horizons of digital anthropology, demonstrating how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital/media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital assume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of anextra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory. Praise for Music and Digital Media ‘Music and Digital Media is a groundbreaking update to our understandings of sound, media, digitization, and music. Truly transdisciplinary and transnational in scope, it innovates methodologically through new models for collaboration, multi-sited ethnography, and comparative work. It also offers an important defense of—and advancement of—theories of mediation.’ Jonathan Sterne, Communication Studies and Art History, McGill University 'Music and Digital Media is a nuanced exploration of the burgeoning digital music scene across both the global North and the global South. Ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, this collection will become the new standard for this field.' Anna Tsing, Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz 'The global drama of music's digitisation elicits extreme responses – from catastrophe to piratical opportunism – but between them lie more nuanced perspectives. This timely, absolutely necessary collection applies anthropological understanding to a deliriously immersive field, bringing welcome clarity to complex processes whose impact is felt far beyond what we call music.' David Toop, London College of Communication, musician and writer ‘Spanning continents and academic disciplines, the rich ethnographies contained in Music and Digital Media makes it obligatory reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex, contradictory, and momentous effects that digitization is having on musical cultures.’ Eric Drott, Music, University of Texas, Austin ‘This superb collection, with an authoritative overview as its introduction, represents the state of the art in studies of the digitalisation of music. It is also a testament to what anthropology at its reflexive best can offer the rest of the social sciences and humanities.’ David Hesmondhalgh, Media and Communication, University of Leeds ‘This exciting volume forges new ground in the study of local conditions, institutions, and sounds of digital music in the Global South and North. The book’s planetary scope and its commitment to the “messiness” of ethnographic sites and concepts amplifies emergent configurations and meanings of music, the digital, and the aesthetic.’ Marina Peterson, Anthropology, University of Texas, Austi

Music and Digital Media: A planetary anthropology

Anthropology has neglected the study of music. Music and Digital Media shows how and why this should be redressed. It does so by enabling music to expand the horizons of digital anthropology, demonstrating how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital/media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital assume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory

Music, platforms and the digital self: the negotiation of identity in online music cultures in the 2010s

This thesis evaluates the relationship between identity and musical practice in online culture, particularly in relation to the phenomenon of platform capitalism during the 2010s. Working with a concept of musical identity that centres the activity of audiences along with music producers, six case studies investigate how internet users use popular music to negotiate their sense of individual and collective selfhood. Conspicuous consumption is examined as an identity mediator in audience communities and in the work of prominent music critic Anthony Fantano, forming part of a hybridisation of popular music culture with cultural norms unique to the internet. This process is further analysed via the work of musicians associated with online culture, including the band Death Grips and composer Daniel Lopatin. Throughout, parallels are drawn between the nature of music and of digital communication in terms of identity negotiation, demonstrating how these ‘technologies of the self’ work together. The role of digital platforms is central to this study, which is focussed on a decade that saw the internet transformed by streaming services, social media and a transition towards algorithmic content recommendation. Despite these developments, findings show that internet users continue to exercise considerable agency in their use of music in identity negotiation. The innovative and transformative use of platform affordances that intersect with and support users’ musical practice allows both audiences and artists to produce sophisticated, multifaceted and continually evolving representations of the self. For example, the platform-assisted construction and reflexive interpretation of media assemblages is used to negotiate emergent musical identities in a variety of contexts, enabled by the ‘post-scarcity’ media economy of the contemporary internet. Using a mix of qualitative research methods from netnography and ethnomusicology, this project develops our understanding of music’s role within internet culture and more broadly in the formation and negotiation of human identity

Copyright Freeconomics

Innovation has wreaked creative destruction on traditional content platforms. During the decade following Napster\u27s rise and fall, industry organizations launched litigation campaigns to combat the dramatic downward pricing pressure created by the advent of zero-price, copyright-infringing content. These campaigns attracted a torrent of debate among scholars and stakeholders regarding the proper scope and role of copyright law-but this ongoing debate has missed the forest for the trees. Industry organizations have abandoned litigation efforts, and many copyright owners now compete directly with infringing products by offering legitimate content at a price of $0.00. This sea change has ushered in an era of copyright freeconomics. Drawing on an emerging body of behavioral- economics and consumer-psychology literature, this Article demonstrates that, when faced with the magic of zero prices, the neoclassical economic model underpinning modern U.S. copyright law collapses. As a result, the shift to a freeconomic model threatens entrenched tenets that lie at the very heart of copyright law and theory. This Article argues that the traditional dichotomies separating use from ownership and utilitarian rights from moral rights have been seriously eroded, if not outright destroyed. If copyright law does not evolve to face these changes, it will run the risk of extinction through irrelevance. Accordingly, this Article both identifies responsive policy prescriptions and, perhaps more importantly, establishes a set of structured, coherent, and efficient analytical frameworks to aid in their implementation

Copyright Freeconomics

Innovation has wreaked creative destruction on traditional content platforms. During the decade following Napster\u27s rise and fall, industry organizations launched litigation campaigns to combat the dramatic downward pricing pressure created by the advent of zero-price, copyright-infringing content. These campaigns attracted a torrent of debate among scholars and stakeholders regarding the proper scope and role of copyright law-but this ongoing debate has missed the forest for the trees. Industry organizations have abandoned litigation efforts, and many copyright owners now compete directly with infringing products by offering legitimate content at a price of $0.00. This sea change has ushered in an era of copyright freeconomics. Drawing on an emerging body of behavioral economics and consumer-psychology literature, this Article demonstrates that, when faced with the magic of zero prices, the neoclassical economic model underpinning modern U.S. copyright law collapses. As a result, the shift to a freeconomic model threatens entrenched tenets that lie at the very heart of copyright law and theory. This Article argues that the traditional dichotomies separating use from ownership and utilitarian rights from moral rights have been seriously eroded, if not outright destroyed. If copyright law does not evolve to face these changes, it will run the risk of extinction through irrelevance. Accordingly, this Article both identifies responsive policy prescriptions and, perhaps more importantly, establishes a set of structured, coherent, and efficient analytical frameworks to aid in their implementation

ARTiVIS Arts, real-time video and interactivity for sustainability

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Media DigitaisPortuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (SFRH/BD/42555/2007