This collection presents a range of essays on contemporary music distribution and consumption patterns and practices. The contributors to the collection use a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, discussing the consequences and effects of the digital distribution of music as it is manifested in specific cultural contexts. The widespread circulation of music in digital form has far-reaching consequences: not least for how we understand the practices of sourcing and consuming music, the political economy of the music industries, and the relationships between format and aesthetics. Through close empirical engagement with a variety of contexts and analytical frames, the contributors to this collection demonstrate that the changes associated with networked music are always situationally specific, sometimes contentious, and often unexpected in their implications. With chapters covering topics such as the business models of streaming audio, policy and professional discourses around the changing digital music market, the creative affordances of format and circulation, and local practices of accessing and engaging with music in a range of distinct cultural contexts, the book presents an overview of the themes, topics and approaches found in current social and cultural research on the relations between music and digital technology.

Networked Music Performance (NMP) is the essential guide to both playing music online and ensemble music through networks. Offering a range of case studies, from highly technical solutions to inclusive community projects, this book provides inspiration to musicians to try NMP whatever their level of technical expertise. Drawing upon recent research to examine the background and history of the practice as well as specific practical approaches, technical and musical considerations are included for readers, as are ideas around accessibility and creativity. Accessibility is considered in the context of the opportunities that NMP gives to musicians working remotely, as well as some of the barriers to participation in NMP and how these can be overcome. Synchronous and asynchronous approaches to NMP are explored in detail, examining the technical and musical affordances and challenges of working remotely for musicians. Networked Music Performance will appeal to music and music technology students as well as professional musicians and technicians who have started working online and wish to improve their practice. As NMP in the context of music education and community music are also explored, this book supplies educators and community leaders with knowledge and practical guidance on how to move their practice online.

This book provides an `insider’ view of worlds of popular music. It shows the relationship between music, creativity, ideas and localities by looking at cities, independents, genre, globalization and musician’s relationships with each other. Webb examines groups of musicians, audiences and people involved in the music industry and shows the articulation of their position as well as how to understand this theoretically by looking at the city as a centre for music production; the industrial music inspired neo-folk genre; independence and its various meanings as a productive position in the music industry; the globalization of music; and musicians own narratives about working together and dealing with the industry. Utilizing case studies of a variety of different cities -- Bristol, London, New York, San Francisco, Berlin -- and genres -- Trip-hop, Hip-hop, Industrial, Neo-folk -- this volume is a landmark in popular music studies.

Music Sociology critically evaluates current approaches to the study of music in sociology and presents a broad overview of how music is positioned and represented in existing sociological scholarship. It then goes on to offer a new framework for approaching the sociology of music, taking music itself as a starting point, and considering what music sociology can learn from related disciplines such as critical musicology, ethnomusicology, and cultural studies. As a central form of leisure, consumption, and cultural production, music has attracted significant attention from sociologists who seek to understand its deeper socio-cultural meaning. With case studies that address sound environments, consumption, media technologies, local scenes, music heritage, and ageing, the authors highlight the distinctive nature of musical experience, and show how sociology can illuminate it. Providing both a survey of existing perspectives the sociology of music, and a thought-provoking discussion of how the field can move forward, this concise and accessible book will be a vital reading for anyone teaching or studying music from a sociological standpoint.

Remembering Popular Music’s Past capitalizes on the growing interest, globally, in the preservation of popular music’s material past and on scholarly explorations of the ways in which popular music, as heritage, is produced, legitimized and conferred cultural and historical significance. The chapters in this collection consider the spaces, practices and representations that constitute popular music heritage to elucidate how popular music’s past is lived in the present. Thus the focus is on the transformation of popular music into heritage, and the role of history and memory in this process. The cultural studies framework adopted in Remembering Popular Music’s Past encompasses unique approaches to popular music historiography, sociology, film analysis, and archival and museal work. Broadly, the collection deals with the precarious nature of popular music heritage, history and memory.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in Networked Music Performance (NMP) and a historical survey of computer music networking. It introduces current technical trends in NMP and technical issues yet to be addressed. It also lists wireless communication protocols and compares these to the requirements of NMP. Practical use cases and advancements are also discussed.

United in their indebtedness to the scholarship of Raymond Monelle, an international group of contributors, including leading authorities on music and culture, come together in this state of the art volume to investigate different ways in which music signifies. Music semiotics asks what music signifies as well as how the signification process takes place. Looking at the nature of musical texts and music's narrativity, a number of the essays in this collection delve into the relationship between music and philosophy, literature, poetry, folk traditions and the theatre, with opera a genre that particularly lends itself to this mode of investigation. Other contributions look at theories of musical markedness, metaphor and irony, using examples and specific musical texts to serve as case studies to validate their theoretical approaches. Musical works discussed include those by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Stravinsky, Bart Xenakis, Kutavicius and John Adams, offering stimulating discussions of music that attest to its beauty as much as to its intellectual challenge. Taking Monelle's writing as a model, the contributions adhere to a method of logical argumentation presented in a civilized and respectful way, even - and particularly - when controversial issues are at stake, keeping in mind that contemplating the significance of music is a way to contemplate life itself.

This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. Drawing together contributions from a wide range of scholars, the book’s four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology.

How amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Aside from the exceptional history of Tetris, very little is known about gaming culture behind the Iron Curtain. But despite the scarcity of home computers and the absence of hardware and software markets, Czechoslovakia hosted a remarkably active DIY microcomputer scene in the 1980s, producing more than two hundred games that were by turns creative, inventive, and politically subversive. In Gaming the Iron Curtain, Jaroslav Švelch offers the first social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, and the first book-length treatment of computer gaming in any country of the Soviet bloc. Švelch describes how amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Sheltered in state-supported computer clubs, local programmers fashioned games into a medium of expression that, unlike television or the press, was neither regulated nor censored. In the final years of Communist rule, Czechoslovak programmers were among the first in the world to make activist games about current political events, anticipating trends observed decades later in independent or experimental titles. Drawing from extensive interviews as well as political, economic, and social history, Gaming the Iron Curtain tells a compelling tale of gaming the system, introducing us to individuals who used their ingenuity to be active, be creative, and be heard.