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First Monday, Volume 19, Number 10 - 6 October 2014

In 1999, the launch of the peer–to–peer application Napster seemed to augur a new era of digitaldistribution for recorded music and the sociability around it, raising in turn fundamental questionsabout models of production, distribution and consumption of music which, up to that point, hadcome to appear permanent and unassailable. Developed by Northeastern University studentShawn Fanning, his friend Sean Parker, and uncle, John Fanning, the application was initiallydevised to share music among friends. Although there were applications and cultures of usepreceding Napster that enabled users to exchange digital music files on the Internet (perhapsmost notably FTP servers, the Usenet alt.binaries groups, and latterly MP3.com), and despite thefact that, in retrospect, Napster had limited capabilities (particularly dial–up speed at that time,and the technological and legal issues arising from use of a central server), it rapidly became ahub for mass digital music sharing and exchange. In about a year, over 32 million people hadinstalled and used the application (Smith, 2000a, 2000b). By 2001, the number of active usershad risen to 50 million (Bergmann, 2004). In the popular press and to some extent in the popularimagination, Napster then became the symbol of a new digital era.

The perceived impact of the technology and the spread and scale of adoption attracted theattention of music industry bodies. Following highly publicized copyright infringement lawsuitsinvolving artists such as Metallica, Madonna and Dr. Dre, online exchanges of music becamesubject to heightened surveillance and prosecution, and music and cultural industry bodies actedon and campaigned for increasingly stringent intellectual property law reform and tradeagreements across the globe. The president of AOL Time Warner at the time summarized thesituation as follows: “The major labels were asleep at the switch. They are asleep no longer.” [1]

At the core of the disputes around copyright, access and illicit distribution was the MP3 file, theprimary format, fetish and currency of musical exchange:

The dominance of the MP3 music file format was largelythe result of the conveniently small size of the compressedfile and its distribution by Napster file–sharing software,which became hugely popular between its release in 1999and its first closure in 2001. (Martin, et al., 2010)

The Napster “moment” is thus a convergence, a hybrid network: a disruptive articulation offormat, medium, platform, network, hardware and social and cultural practice, at a particularcritical juncture in the history of the Internet, and in the history of recorded popular music asmass entertainment. Earlier positions in prior debates (about home taping, for example, or theappropriate stance for musicians’ unions at the advent of the disc jockey) resurfaced in differentguises. In many respects, the controversy around Napster also presaged and set the ground fordebates that later took place: about torrenting and “pirate politics”; about democratization, freespeech and the digital commons; about fair use and remix culture; about disintermediation andrevenue streams on YouTube and Spotify; about entrepreneurialism and micro–celebrity in anattention economy; about clicktivism, proprietary social media and user–generated content; aboutcontrolled substances, restricted objects, 3D printing, and the darknet; and more broadly, aboutthe unsettled economics and participatory cultures of digital media use and distribution.

In facilitating the free exchange of MP3 files between peers, Napster was implicated in decliningrecorded music sales. Shawn Fanning, however, had a different interpretation:

As Napster grew and ultimately hit its peak, if you look atCD sales [they] were up as long as Napster was popular.The point at which Napster started filtering (blockingcertain songs, after a court order in March 2001) is thepoint at which the record industry announced that theconstant increase in their CD sales suddenly changed. [2]

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The “file–sharing=lost sales” narrative is complicated by a range of features of the market at thattime. Reissues drove a significant portion of the apparently healthy CD market in the 1990s — aparticular demographic upgrading their vinyl collections. The industry was itself consolidating, andas a consequence the range and variety of music being released was decreasing. The price of CDsincreased at the same time that, in the post–September 11 recession, spending on leisure goodsdeclined. Simultaneously, the range of leisure options for industry target markets was proliferating(such as gaming and mobile telephony, and perhaps most importantly, the Internet itself).

The initial approach adopted by the music industries was widely perceived to be alienating to theircore constituency. Although in historical terms the music industries had themselves thrived on thetactics of “piracy” (David, 2012; Lessig, 2004), the dominant rhetoric discursively positioned themost loyal and active music consumers as thieves (rather than as the hyper–consumers andagents and subjects of viral media that they would come to appear from later perspectives).Cease–and–desist “spamigation” garnered wide publicity, and an impressive and still expandingarsenal of legal and policy instruments defending the content industries’ economic interests wasdeveloped, but these strategies failed to arrest or retard file–sharing. The digital distributionecology after Napster saw a whole array of technological advances; most notably direct downloadservices (such as RapidShare, Megaupload and MediaFire), and the BitTorrent protocol. WhileNapster and the MP3 format concentrated attention on music, before and after Napster, a widerange of media forms have circulated through file–sharing communities and continue to do so,including books, images, and film.

Gradually, the intervening period has also seen digital music distribution technologies in closerelations with speculative investment capital as well as with more established music industryentities: the supersession of some distributive channels and industry elements, and thedevelopment of legal alternatives to illicit file–sharing (Amazon, iTunes, then Spotify, Deezer).This would seem to lend credence to the idea that the internationally organized legal and policyresponse to file–sharing “was not a response to falling profitability due to piracy, but instead asuccessful counter–strategy to relieve anti–trust pressures while legally securing the Internet asan alternative distribution channel” (Denegri–Knott, 2004). There has not, however, been a cleartransition to digitization of the means by which music is produced, distributed and consumed.Rather, these means are multiple and dynamic, and remain in flux.

In 2005, David Beer (2005a, 2005b) edited the very first special issue of First Monday on thetheme of “music and the Internet” at http://firstmonday.org/issue/view/211. In his editorial, Beernoted that the emergence of the Internet as a space for musical exchanges contains the premisesof contrary logics. He writes: “These competing utopian and dystopian rhetorical formulationshave been woven into the conceptualization and ideological representation of the relationshipbetween music and the Internet” (Beer, 2005a). Beer’s objective was to map out the ways inwhich “Technology (in this case the Internet), rhetoric, and everyday life (the practices of musiccreation and appropriation)” are interwoven. Beer summarizes (the short history of the Internet)by emphasizing a series of contradictory logics and binaries. He writes: “The Internet has beenconstructed and reconstructed as a paradoxical space of democracy and control, creativity andconstraint, art and cognition, truth and deviance, and, perhaps most interestingly, as bothbiological and mechanical” (Beer, 2005a). Nine years after the issue on ‘music and the Internet’ inFirst Monday, and 15 years after the advent of Napster, the constitutive interrelationshipsbetween the Internet, music and everyday life seem to have resulted in much more fragmentedcultures than the initial conflicts of interests and dichotomies (utopian/dystopian) would have hadus imagine.

In preparing for this special edition, it struck us as editors that this fragmentation andambivalence is evident in narrative accounts of the period of time since Napster, which so oftenfocus on particular and very specific historical moments. These moments, in scholarly, journalistic,and everyday description, seem in their narrative contexts to crystallize and highlight models orideals of how music and technology should or could intersect, often with musicians, and/orlisteners and fans, variously positioned as “rightly” future–oriented; correctly understanding thebrave new digital mediascape, or else as badly getting it “wrong”. The effect of these moments intheir telling is often to constitute an understanding of the “correct” or appropriate moral roles forthe law, or for the market, or profit, or for the extent to which particular forms of under–articulated moral and affective entitlements should not be subject to seemingly distorting legal ormarket intervention. These are moments that afford in the telling an airing of delicate balances, acalibration of the limits to the “rights” and “obligations” of the parties to the encounter that is therecorded musical work as commodity.

There are a number of such moments, but perhaps a list of the most commonly told would includethe following:

In early 2004, copies of American DJ Danger Mouse’srecording The Grey Album, distributed initially on CD,circulated widely online. The recording was a mash–up,featuring a cappella vocals from Jay–Z’s Black Album andinstrumental samples from the Beatles’ White Album.February 24th of that year was named “Grey Tuesday”, aday of online protest organized in response to EMI andCapitol Records (Universal Music Group), who sought to

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have distribution of the recording stopped. The protestaction on Grey Tuesday consisted largely of downloadingThe Grey Album and posting it online for download. Thiswas considered to be a kind of civil disobedience, againstcopyright–as–censorship (Howard–Spink, 2004;Rambarran, 2013). Danger Mouse, also known as BrianBurton, went on to significant commercial success,including producing the Gorillaz album Demon Days (EMI)and the Beck album Modern Guilt (Universal Music Group).

In October of 2007, English alternative rock bandRadiohead released their seventh album, In Rainbows, asa “pay–what–you–want” download, and as a CD later onthat year. Their demarche was yet another sign of theband’s increasing distrust in major record labels. From theearly days of file–sharing, front singer and leader ThomYorke had stated: “The cool thing about Napster is that it... encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that themusic industry has long forgotten to do” (2000, inNapster, 2001). The band also refused to make theircatalogue available on iTunes until 2008. After beingreleased from their contract with EMI, Radiohead decidedto let their fans decide how they would obtain theirseventh opus. Of course, the band already enjoyedmassive commercial and critical recognition at the time,and In Rainbows proved more successful than theirprevious albums (see Madden, 2009), even if a largenumber of downloaders (60 percent) chose not to pay forthe album (Morrow, 2009). There was much debatefollowing Radiohead’s initiative: initially, about whetherthis was how music “should” be distributed in future; andlatterly, about whether Radiohead had really doneanything all that radical. Indeed, when releasing theireighth album The King of Limbs in 2011, with the supportof independent music label XL Recordings, the band chosetraditional means to diffuse their music, such as onlinelegal downloading through iTunes, and CD.

In 2009, Jammie Thomas–Rasset, from Brainerd,Minnesota, was found liable for copyright infringement andordered to pay statutory damages of US$1.92 million, fordownloading and sharing (“making available”) 24 songs onthe file–sharing platform Kazaa. This was the first file–sharing infringement case in the U.S. to come before ajury. The case had been before the courts since 2007. InSeptember 2012, the damages were revised (again), toUS$222,000.

In 2012 Amanda Palmer, formerly of the American duoDresden Dolls, raised over US$1 million on thecrowdfunding site Kickstarter to release the album Theatreis Evil, which subsequently reached number 10 in theBillboard albums chart in September of that year. TheKickstarter campaign shows Palmer holding up a sign,which reads “This is the future of music”. In the sameyear, Palmer requested local musicians to support her ontour dates. These musicians would be paid “in beer, hugsand merch”. She later decided to pay these musicians, inmoney.

We could continue recounting such stories; there are many of them. Doubtless readers can thinkof their own additions to this list. As they are told, an interesting feature these moments share istheir capacity for articulating moral positions on music. The teller of and the listener to the storysense out the shapes of their respective moral understandings, and by extension of their ideas ofgood lives and good societies, through talking about the “worth” or “value” of music and musicallabor, as this is experienced, and as it is signaled by costs of various kinds (Whelan, 2014).

When we review these moments, yes, we reflect on stories about the unpredictable and volatileworld of popular music online. We contemplate how music is distributed, how it is marketed, inmediascapes where the sense is that most of the traditional landmarks seem to have stoppedmaking sense (regardless of their mythic status), and where there are not (yet) “new” landmarks,with stability sufficient to warrant use as aids to navigation. But we reflect also on music as aflashpoint in a rapidly changing social and cultural environment. This is music in use ininescapably monetized and highly liquid media environments, and it raises anew the question ofhow music, and thus cultural work more broadly, could and should be sustained, and how dues

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can be rightly allocated and earned from it. This is music with a dynamic status in culturalhierarchies, music as a continuous feature of ubiquitous media cultures, music as an element incultures of promotion. Often, then, the story is not exactly or only about music online: it is aboutthe entrepreneurial economics of promotional culture in digital media.

The narrative often defaults along these lines, becoming one where music is a sign of community,and under the ideology of the technological sublime, community was going to be rejuvenated bythe Internet, and so music would become accordingly “free”. There is satisfaction when this idealappears to be borne out, and frustration when, as so often, it goes wrong, although not always inthe “right” ways — the ways we would anticipate as validation of the model. The implication,surely, is that we should attend very carefully to the assumptions we bring to the field, constitutedas it is from assumptions so successfully and widely shared that they become entirely tacit.

Part of the intention with this special issue is to disrupt some of these tacit assumptions. We hopethat the papers making up this issue demonstrate that things can look very different from othervantage points than those provided by the customary and often reiterated narratives. Thesenarratives have predictable coordinates, and despite the fantasy of the deterritorialized ordisembedded online musical ecology — of music “freed” from the tyranny of space — they followvery familiar trajectories, both in terms of the political and economic geography of culturalproduction, and in terms of ideas of what music–as–commodity or music–as–artefact is and howthe Internet is presumed to change it.

Repetition of these narratives tends in consequence to normalize a particular kind of provincialism,which is not only in this instance reducible to U.S.–centricity. The continuously reiterated omissionof elsewhere leads to a situation where people come to think of these narratives as highlightinguniversal and self­evident truths. Music online, however, has radically discrepant meanings indifferent regions, in different cultural and institutional contexts, and to social groups workingagainst and contesting their own, distinct dominant perspectives. In other contexts and otherplaces, the relationship between music and networked culture becomes salient for very differentreasons, or on grounds shaped by very different local histories, contingencies and priorities. Theforms and configurations digital music takes in these contexts can seem weirdly familiar to thedominant perspectives expressed in the conventional narratives, but in reality these forms andconfigurations can only be properly grasped with respect to their local contexts of emergence.

This argument for sensitivity to the local is supported also by the idea that insofar as unitary or“macro” perspectives on the issues of digital music distribution are possible, many of the largescale technological, economic and legal catalysts for changes in music distribution online arecompletely obscure except to (some) industry professionals in the music industry, law, ortechnology, and detailed knowledge of them is often occluded, or made manifest in research thatis either not transparent, or not publicly available. A clear lesson from the disputes about filesharing, broadband use, revenue and intellectual property in the last decade and a half is thatthese macro perspectives, rendered credible and audible as they are by market logics or otherkinds of institutional hegemony, are themselves partial, elliptical, and often highly motivated.

The way these kinds of stories are told, then, often serves particular purposes. Insofar as specificelements are foregrounded or the stories invite particular kinds of understandings, they mobilizeparticular kinds of popular narratives (big content is bad, worthy musicians will win out, marketssupport talent, fans are community etc.). Yet the array of interests, claims and intentions thatdefine these stories and make them sensible are only fragments in complex dynamics, requiring acollective effort to grasp.

Digital or networked music culture is not, therefore, one thing, although it is the sort of object thatenables these kinds of narratives or facilitates them. The changes wrought on music cultures bythe digital age of music technology are inherently complex, dispersed, non–linear and ambivalent.They go beyond the continuity/disruption dichotomy. One example of such complexity is given byhow audiences use and redefine different types of music technologies to access music content,sometimes associating particular practices of listening or engagement with particular media forms,and particular genres (Maggauda, 2011; Nowak, 2014). Processes of efficiency, cost and “logic”alone do not drive the uptake and abandonment of particular media and distributive forms,although they may intersect with them or come retrospectively to be mapped on to them. Thechanging media environment remains dynamic, and definitive statements about outcomes oftencome to seem foolhardy with hindsight: the history of music and the Internet remains a work inprogress.

With this foundational caveat in mind, it is worth contextualizing the papers making up this specialedition with reference to some conceptual resources, which can perhaps facilitate understanding ofthe roles played by digital music in the 15 years since the launch of Napster. When looking at theinterconnections between the Internet and music, the course of recent history seems to inscribenew technologies under the umbrella of “complexity” (Urry, 2005; 2006). John Urry groups underthe term “complexity” a set of social transformations and relations that are increasinglycharacterized by their non–linearity, which seems to perfectly apply to the case of music in thedigital age. Urry writes: “complex social interactions are likened to walking through a maze whosewalls rearrange themselves as one walks through; new footsteps have to be taken in order toadjust to the walls of the maze that are adapting to each movement made through the maze” [3].Insofar as the Internet has become “participative” in “Web 2.0” (John, 2012), users, technologies,musical forms and cultures of use both constitute and move the walls of the maze through their

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online action and interaction. The sorts of narratives we have alluded to participate in thecomplexity of the relations between music and the Internet. They point to it, at the same timethat they instantiate it.

This strangely prismatic sense of music/technology as a field of inquiry is congruent with theunderstanding of digitally distributed, networked music as a “boundary object”, the heterogeneousforce animating the maze. Boundary objects, in the classic definition, are

... both plastic enough to adapt to local needs andconstraints of the several parties employing them, yetrobust enough to maintain a common identity across sites.They are weakly structured in common use, and becomestrongly structured in individual–site use. They may beabstract or concrete. They have different meanings indifferent social worlds but their structure is commonenough to more than one world to make themrecognizable, a means of translation. The creation andmanagement of boundary objects is key in developing andmaintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds.[4]

Tracing this conception through Fujimura (1992) and McSherry (2001) to Strathern (2004), thephrase “boundary object” can be used to refer to nodal events or entities, situated at thejunctures of distinct discourses and distinct local cultures and social realities. Our point is not justthat the replicating, moving digital audio files first foregrounded by Napster served to bringdiscrepant localities to awareness of themselves (as the subjects of collective practices, as socialgroups with specific interests, and specific positions in technological infrastructures and legalframeworks). Digital audio culture has long been recognized for having also produced its ownsubcultures, often with only tangential connections to local, geographical “scenes” (Caspary andManzenreiter, 2003). Nor is it simply that these audio files continue to play such a critical role inproducing dialogue across and with other such localities, highlighting in the course of theproduction of translation contexts some of the ethical and social problematics involved as theyreconstitute the fields they move through (Novak, 2011). These are crucial and valid insightsinvolved in considering digital music as a boundary object: both trafficked, and, thereby, theconduit of traffic. What is perhaps most interesting about the boundary object is not that it is notcoherently unitary, but how it is that it continues to be spoken of as though it were [5]. Digitalmusic is only ever fractionally coherent, and there is only ever partial jurisdiction over it. Mostfundamentally, this insight applies to digital music as it circulates across the terrains of everydaylife, and as it is shaped in and by scholarly and interpretive discourses that aim to make sense ofthis process; they too utilize and produce it in this way. The papers assembled here point preciselyto this feature and role for digital music over the last fifteen years: as a boundary object, digitalmusic distribution serves also as a translation context, where distinct disciplinary formations cancome together to talk it identifiably into being from their own productively partial perspectives.

First Monday is the perfect location to offer insights into some of the issues that constitute digitalmusic as a boundary object. Indeed, the journal has always been at the forefront of issues relatedto digital music cultures, publishing many papers tackling the technological, cultural and socialchanges associated with the advent and dissemination of digital music cultures. From theemergence of digital technologies and file sharing, First Monday has featured pieces thatinterrogated this phenomenon, notably, addressing “piracy” (Kasaras, 2002); investigating thenature of exchange on the peer–to–peer application Gnutella (Adar and Huberman, 2000)exploring the idea of Napster itself as a community (Poblocki, 2001); discussing issues ofcopyright (Bowrey and Rimmer, 2005; Dolfsma, 2000; Geist, 2005; Logie, 2003; Söderberg,2002); and, investigating the emerging online music industries (Fox, 2002).

As the scenario grew more complex with the establishment of digital music markets and digitalmusic distribution as a licit service, First Monday remained at the forefront of research in the field,publishing papers that addressed such phenomena as Internet activism and mash–ups (Howard–Spink, 2004); podcasting (Crofts, et al., 2005); subcultures (Ebare, 2004); netlabels (Galuszka,2012); independent musicians (Pfahl, 2005); crowdfunding (Galuszka and Bystrov, 2014), artists’earnings (Kretschmer, 2005); Internet mobile technologies (Dolan, 2000); ringtones (Gopinath,2005); cloud technology (Morris, 2011); press reactions to file–sharing before the RIAA–Napstercourt case (Russell, 2006); gifting (McGee and Skågeby, 2005); and tactics of file–sharing andfile–sharing suppression (Martin, et al., 2010). These various contributions have proved vital tothe community of inquiry concerned with the heritage and ecology of peer–to–peer in all itscultural, social, technological, economic and legal complexity. With this current edition, FirstMonday is again the site of a critical discussion between a range of researchers, from differentnational contexts and disciplines, presenting original research on essential features of digital audioculture at the advent of Napster and after it. The contributions are arranged as follows:

In the first paper, David Carter and Ian Rogers interrogate the narrative of democratization thathas accompanied the digital age of music technologies and permeates the discourses around someof its iconic media, notably, Napster and Pitchfork. They proceed in critiquing the taken–for–granted notion that digital technologies have disrupted the ways music is produced and accessedby individuals, and rather anchor these new technologies within logics of continuity. Carter andRogers see in these technologies a false promise of democratization, given that they only

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integrate a select few into the market place they ostensibly initially critiqued.

Following this, Dan L. Burk looks at how p2p designers and entrepreneurs have adapted tocopyright laws to increase the technical possibilities of legally controversial applications. Whilecopyright is intended to respond to technological evolutions and defend artistic creativity, Burkdemonstrates adroitly how, following the court decision against Napster in 2001, subsequenttechnologies (such as Grokster, StreamCast, and KaZaa) learned from the legal reproachesdirected to Napster and were quite carefully designed to bypass them, to the extent that (content)copyright can arguably be described as an unwitting boon to (p2p software) innovation.Analogously, technological development stimulates increasingly sophisticated forms of legalliability. Contrary to the conventional picture of law lagging to “catch up” with technologicaldevelopment, Burk’s account implies technological and legal developments in close dialogue, andhe shows how legal decisions in the early days have come to shape the terrain for many of thedevelopments which followed.

Then, starting from the premise that Napster, and access to digital music more broadly, was animportant driver of early Internet adoption, Andrea Guzman and Steve Jones analyze mediacoverage of Napster at the time of its short–lived ascent and ultimate closure, in both mainstreamnews and in the music press. Given that Napster’s relatively low–key or “below the radar” earlydiffusion was across U.S. college campuses (and that broadband was not commonly availableoutside of colleges and work environments in the U.S. at that time), press coverage was how mostpeople first learned about Napster and MP3 file–sharing. Guzman and Jones find that, oddly, themusic press barely mentioned Napster at that time: Napster seems to have been understood, bymusic journalists, at least, as a “technological” rather than a “musical” development. They discussthe way in which Napster was presented or “framed” in media coverage, with particular aspects ofthe technology and the sociality of the platform back– or foregrounded, and present fascinatingearly descriptions of the technology at a time when “what it is” was not at all a question with aclear and straightforward answer. The technology, its users, and its developers, were in somecoverage positioned rhetorically as almost a kind of countercultural social movement, with youngpeople taking on “the Establishment” for their “rights” to music.

Ard Huizing and Jan A. van der Wal provide an original exploration of the “Warez” MP3 scene, itsrise, and its fall. Drawing on insider research tools, they identify relational, technological andorganizational factors to explain the initial success of the scene. However, the subculture caughtthe attention of the RIAA, and Huizing and van der Wal show how it became disorganized byparticular elements from within. The sophistication of the technology and its relative ease of useslowly diffused the “scene”, at the same time that it became increasingly populated by morecasual and less passionate “sceners”.

The article by Florence Nowak provides an essential anthropological account of thetransformations of the digital age in the Garhwali region of India. The omnipresence of MP3 filesdisseminates local music, and provides a temporary profit for artists. However, the globaltransformations of the digital are incorporated within local life and the local market for music. Theparticular context of the Garhwali region increasingly entangles issues of modernity versustradition, urban versus rural, and western India versus Garwhali.

In Germany, the royalty–collecting agency GEMA has been involved in a long–running — and atthe time of writing still unresolved — dispute with YouTube concerning remuneration for audiostreamed on YouTube. While the German context is unique, the strategies deployed by the partiesconcerned, and how they are presented and contested, is indicative of broader tendencies in thecontemporary controversy about streaming audio and how the issue of appropriate remunerationfor labels, publishers and authors can be resolved. In his paper, Philip Stade conducts a discourseanalysis of the various positions to this debate as it is conducted online, in the press, and instatements from GEMA and YouTube, with particular reference to the positioning and pre–positioning conducted by the parties. Stade is able to show the tacit and under–articulatedelements to the positions assumed by GEMA, by YouTube, and by their respective advocates andcritics, excavating some of the moral work and the assumptions mobilized in the debate aboutstreaming, copyright, access and revenue.

Margie Borschke explores MP3 blogs and the romantic claims and ideals of authenticity that haveaccompanied the development and mass uptake of the Internet as a location for public, and yetpersonal, music curation. Playing a role in the success of some artists, some bloggers have beenacknowledged and courted by music labels. On the other hand, there is a strong component ofanti–commercialism in how music is shared through MP3 blogs. In considering these issues,Borschke elaborates upon what she calls the ‘aesthetic dimensions’ of piracy practices.

Raphaël Nowak looks at issues of contemporary forms of music consumption, and interrogates theways in which the materiality of music technologies comes into play when consuming recordedmusic. Indeed, he notes that literature on listening often neglects the input of the musictechnologies used to access music. He then proceeds to offer two sociological framings ofindividuals’ interactions with music technologies — through their affordances, and within themoment of material interactions.

On the basis of extensive fieldwork in Port–Vila, Vanuatu’s capital, Monika Stern shows howmusical exchange is not reducible to a commodity relationship in locations where music, alongwith other goods which are highly significant in cultural terms, represents and articulates delicate

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webs of social relationships: its movement (digital or otherwise) is embedded in complex systemsof social exchange. She describes how mobile telephony, in the absence of a robust electricitynetwork for cable Internet delivery, has impacted on and extended longstanding traditional circuitsof musical transmission, through the use of mobile phone memory cards as storage media fordigital music file transfer. Vanuatu’s commitment to intellectual property, facing administrativeand financial challenges in implementation, appears to run counter to and feel incongruous forlocal practice. Legal and technological infrastructures thus interact in unpredictable (and oftenuntenably contradictory) ways with customary practices of musical transmission.

Also drawing on fieldwork immersion, here with the Verdurada straight edge collective in SãoPaulo, Jhessica Reia describes the role access to digital music and online distribution channels playfor this local punk scene, where a fundamental ideal of scene autonomy and a fierce commitmentto a participatory DIY culture are key guiding values. Reia’s research highlights how digitaldistribution and access to online channels of communication foster and facilitate the articulation ofthe straight edge subculture and ethos both locally and internationally. At the same time, the idealof autonomy is articulated in highly specific ways with respect to online “piracy” (where there is amoral imperative to support the scene financially), at the same time that it seems to be belied byan instrumental approach to the massive corporate actors who dominate “free” access (YouTube,MySpace and so on). As with Stern’s paper, Reia shows how online distribution intersects withlocal perspectives on music exchange, and local understandings of the appropriate role for marketinvolvement in music within a particular cultural context.

Haftor Medbøe and José Dias then look at how the conventions of jazz have evolved over time,and interrogate the transformations that the genre has seen in the digital age. As jazzpractitioners, they provide an insider perspective into how jazz musicians have adapted to adecentralized and often precarious and unpredictable culture of music dissemination. Medbøe andDias go on to discuss whether these changes are synonymous with the rise of democratic accessto jazz music, or to a culture of mediocrity, and explore various options that jazz musicians haveexplored to promote their work in the digital age.

In the final paper in the edition, Stéphanie Khoury and Joséphine Simonnot discuss the importantwork being conducted in the digitization of the CNRS–Musée de l’Homme ethnomusicology archivein Paris. Here, the complex ethical issues around the social and cultural implications of theethnomusicological archive, understood broadly in the context of the anthropological and colonialencounter, come to be articulated in the shape of the open­access, open­source digital museum,and the impetus, often associated with the digital humanities, toward large internationalcollaborations between such museums. At the Musée de l’Homme, a sophisticated classificatorysystem for audio files and associated metadata, alongside a permissions system for users withtiered access levels, simultaneously navigate and express the intersecting problematics ofcustodianship, tradition, technology and intellectual property in the audio archive, where thatarchive is subject to a state injunction to open access. Khoury and Simonnot remind us that thechallenges and opportunities so often associated with the advent of Napster and digital musicdistribution came to unfold along quite distinct trajectories with respect to cultural institutions:ethnomusicological and archival ideals, collaborative database infrastructure design, and theneeds of researchers, traditional owners, and funding agencies, present a complex set of issues tosteer through. The ideas mobilizing mass file–sharing and “free” music online, like the technologywhich affords the spread of these ideas and their actualization, have their own distinct lineage andembedded­ness in the institutional and cultural context of the ethnomusicological archive, devotedas it is to the preservation of the common human legacy of recorded music. Analogously, respectfor originating communities and sensitivities around particular recordings present distinct morallimits to universal open access as it is sometimes advocated for. Moreover, some of the issuesinvolved here, while novel and seemingly radical to advocates of open access and remix culture(e.g., Vaidhyanathan, 2004: Lessig, 2004), have a long history of debate for ethnomusicology ingeneral and, as Khoury and Simonnot describe, for the Musée de l’Homme in particular.

Taken together, this range of contributions, from both emerging and established scholars withinterests in digital music distribution, provides a particular and novel depth of vision, into bothdevelopments in digital music in the time since Napster, and the current issues and discussions inthe field. The research in the area is vibrant, drawn from a rich variety of disciplinary orientations,and shows especially the crucial and ongoing importance of music online, internationally andacross academic communities.

About the authors

Raphaël Nowak is a cultural sociologist and adjunct member of the Griffith Centre for CulturalResearch at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.E–mail: raph [dot] nowak [at] gmail [dot] com

Andrew Whelan is a senior lecturer in sociology in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts atthe University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia.E–mail: awhelan [at] uow [dot] edu [dot] au

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Edward J. Valauskas for his enthusiasm for this special issue and for hisconstant availability, patience and guidance throughout the development of the project. We alsothank our contributors, and all the other people involved in helping them and us in the realizationof this issue of First Monday. We especially thank the anonymous peer reviewers for theirdiligence, care, and support.

Notes

1. Parsons, 2000, quoted in Coleman, 2004, p. 193.

2. Fanning, 2001, quoted in Coleman, 2004, p. 182.

3. Urry, 2005, p. 3.

4. Star and Griesemer, 1989, p. 393.

5. Strathern, 2004, p. 22.

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Editorial history

Received 9 September 2014; accepted 10 September 2014.

“Editorial: A special issue of First Monday on the 15–year anniversary of Napster — Digital musicas boundary object by Raphaël Nowak and Andrew Whelan is licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Editorial: On the 15–year anniversary of Napster — Digital music as boundary objectby Raphaël Nowak and Andrew Whelan.First Monday, Volume 19, Number 10 ­ 6 October 2014http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/5542/4121doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i10.5542