Reviewed by: Music and Cyberliberties Gerry Szymanski Music and Cyberliberties. By Patrick Burkart. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010. [xi, 180 p. ISBN 9780819569172 (hardcover), $70; ISBN 9780819569189 (paperback), $24.95.] Bibliography, index. When incoming freshman arrive at our music libraries and don't even know what in the world to do with a compact disc, much less a cassette or an LP record, is this a sign of the impending apocalypse? In his book Music and Cyberliberties, Patrick Burkart would seem to think that the sorry state of the business today shares some of that eschatology, with the four fiery horsemen played by Sony-BMG, Vivendi-Universal, Warner, and EMI. And it's certainly true; since the turn of the century, the music industry has changed radically in a very short amount of time. With the introduction of the Apple's iTunes online store, more music is now being purchased digitally through a computer than physically on such traditional media as the compact disc. But in framing the struggle between the powerful conglomerate labels that have sorted out in the music recording industry and altruistic individual musicians or bands, Burkart adds an element of melodrama with his use of arduous sociological lingo that almost pushes the tone into gimcrackery. As such, this book explores the ontology of normative lifeworlds through the theory of communicative action, and does not do it in the everyday language of the musician, or even music scholar. From the first pages of the extensive introduction (and the list of over seventy abbreviated acronyms), the audience of the book would appear to be the professional sociologist or doctor of philosophy, not the undergraduate music student looking for a source for that bygone, half-forgotten Napster, or even a graduate student wrestling with digital rights management issues. Both topics are featured at length in Music and Cyberliberties, with the history of the rise and fall of the file-sharing site Napster marked as a "watershed" in cyberlibertarianism. This struggle between the user-driven "darknet" site and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is described in well-written prose and a fairly straightforward manner before the reader is confronted by a sentence such as "So far, incursions from the music lifeworld into the system have not institutionalized into anything like reverse colonization, reverse juridification or decommodification" (pp. 87-88). Is my OED handy? [End Page 555] The situation since the fall of Napster and the realization by the industry that something had to be done in the digital realm leads into a intense discussion of what was to be the next golden age of music, the so-called "Celestial Jukebox"—a phrase defined in a note to the introduction as "the actual or envisioned technology and policy regime that accommodates the media business model of the 'pay-per society' " (p. 143). The origin of this phrase would appear to be a book authored in 1989 by Vincent Mosco called The Pay-Per Society: Computers and Communication in the Information Age: Essays in Critical Theory (Norwood, NJ: Ablex). The crux of Burkart's book, then, is the resistance of the performing musician and the members of the general populace to the attempt on the part of the "big four" music corporate entities mentioned above, along with their legal arm, the RIAA, to force the "Celestial Jukebox" onto the "lifeworld." The social and cultural responses in which the struggle manifests itself are hacking, .mp3 file-sharing and alternative distribution models which try to "stick it to the man." While the somewhat painful shift from mostly physical to mostly digital music in this last decade is all very important and quite relevant, the presentation of these important issues, using the complex philosophical jargon of Jürgen Habermas from Theodore Adorno's Frankfurt school of social theory, makes for a very tough read. Perhaps it is indeed a titanic war between the autocratic recording companies and the heroic hoarder of music who can't just pop a compact disc into a player, but now needs "authentication" from a Web site. Perhaps, also, "virtual communities reproduce systematically distorted communications by being organized in hierarchical administrative-bureaucratic power relationships" (p. 80). Perhaps, indeed...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
May 16, 2023
Luh Kade Devi Dwiyani + 2
