This edited collection considers various meanings of the "Spotification" of music and other media. Specifically, it replies to the editor's call to address the changes in media cultures and industries accompanying the transition to streaming media and media services. Streaming media services have become part of daily life all over the world, with Spotify, in particular, inheriting and reconfiguring characteristics of older ways of publishing, distributing, and consuming media. The contributors look to the broader community of music, media, and cultural researchers to spell out some of the implications of the Spotification of music and popular culture. These include changes in personal media consumption and production, educational processes, and the work of media industries. Interdisciplinary scholarship on commercial digital distribution is needed more than ever to illuminate the qualitative changes to production, distribution, and consumption accompanying streaming music and television. This book represents the latest research and theory on the conversion of mass markets for recorded music to streaming services.

Digital piracy cultures and peer-to-peer technologies combined to spark transformations in audio-visual distribution between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s. Digital piracy also inspired the creation of a global anti-piracy law and policy regime, and counter-movements such as the Swedish and German Pirate Parties. These trends provide starting points for a wide-ranging debate about the prospects for deep and lasting changes in social life enabled by piratical technology practices. This edited volume brings together contemporary scholarship in communication and media studies, addressing piracy as a recombinant feature of popular communication, technological innovation, and communication law and policy. An international collection of contributors highlights key debates about piracy, popular communication, and social change, and provides a lasting resource for global media studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Popular Communication.

Digital piracy cultures and peer-to-peer technologies combined to spark transformations in audio-visual distribution between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s. Digital piracy also inspired the creation of a global anti-piracy law and policy regime, and counter-movements such as the Swedish and German Pirate Parties. These trends provide starting points for a wide-ranging debate about the prospects for deep and lasting changes in social life enabled by piratical technology practices. This edited volume brings together contemporary scholarship in communication and media studies, addressing piracy as a recombinant feature of popular communication, technological innovation, and communication law and policy. An international collection of contributors highlights key debates about piracy, popular communication, and social change, and provides a lasting resource for global media studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Popular Communication.

With the rising popularity of online music, the nature of the music industry and the role of the Internet are rapidly changing. Rather than buying records, tapes, or CDs-in other words, full-length collections of music-music shoppers can, as they have in earlier decades, purchase just one song at a time. It's akin to putting a coin into a diner jukebox-except the jukebox is in the sky, or, more accurately, out in cyberspace. But has increasing copyright protection gone too far in keeping the music from the masses? Digital Music Wars explores these transformations and the far-reaching implications of downloading music in an in-depth and insightful way. Focusing on recent legal, corporate, and technological developments, the authors show how the online music industry will establish the model for digital distribution, cultural access, and consumer privacy. Music lovers and savvy online shoppers will want to read this book, as will students and researchers interested in new media and the future of online culture.

When people think of hackers, they usually think of a lone wolf acting with the intent to garner personal data for identity theft and fraud. But what about the corporations and government entities that use hacking as a strategy for managing risk? Why Hackers Win asks the pivotal question of how and why the instrumental uses of invasive software by corporations and government agencies contribute to social change. Through a critical communication and media studies lens, the book focuses on the struggles of breaking and defending the "trusted systems" underlying our everyday use of technology. It compares the United States and the European Union, exploring how cybersecurity and hacking accelerate each other in digital capitalism, and how the competitive advantage that hackers can provide corporations and governments may actually afford new venues for commodity development and exchange. Presenting prominent case studies of communication law and policy, corporate hacks, and key players in the global cybersecurity market, the book proposes a political economic model of new markets for software vulnerabilities and exploits, and clearly illustrates the social functions of hacking.

When people think of hackers, they usually think of a lone wolf acting with the intent to garner personal data for identity theft and fraud. But what about the corporations and government entities that use hacking as a strategy for managing risk? Why Hackers Win asks the pivotal question of how and why the instrumental uses of invasive software by corporations and government agencies contribute to social change. Through a critical communication and media studies lens, the book focuses on the struggles of breaking and defending the "trusted systems" underlying our everyday use of technology. It compares the United States and the European Union, exploring how cybersecurity and hacking accelerate each other in digital capitalism, and how the competitive advantage that hackers can provide corporations and governments may actually afford new venues for commodity development and exchange. Presenting prominent case studies of communication law and policy, corporate hacks, and key players in the global cybersecurity market, the book proposes a political economic model of new markets for software vulnerabilities and exploits, and clearly illustrates the social functions of hacking.

With the rising popularity of online music, the nature of the music industry and the role of the Internet are rapidly changing. Rather than buying records, tapes, or CDs_in other words, full-length collections of music_music shoppers can, as they have in earlier decades, purchase just one song at a time. It's akin to putting a coin into a diner jukebox_except the jukebox is in the sky, or, more accurately, out in cyberspace. But has increasing copyright protection gone too far in keeping the music from the masses? Digital Music Wars explores these transformations and the far-reaching implications of downloading music in an in-depth and insightful way. Focusing on recent legal, corporate, and technological developments, the authors show how the online music industry will establish the model for digital distribution, cultural access, and consumer privacy. Music lovers and savvy online shoppers will want to read this book, as will students and researchers interested in new media and the future of online culture.

Musicians and music fans are at the forefront of cyberliberties activism, a movement that has tried to correct the imbalances that imperil the communal and ritualistic sharing and distribution of music. In Music and Cyberliberties, Patrick Burkart tracks the migration of music advocacy and anti-major label activism since the court defeat of Napster and the ascendancy of the so-called Celestial Jukebox model of music e-commerce, which sells licensed access to music.
Music and Cyberliberties identifies the groups--alternative and radical media activists, culture jammers, hackers, netlabels, and critical legal scholars--who are pushing back against the "copyright grab" by major labels for the rights and privileges that were once enjoyed by artists and fans. Burkart reflects on the emergence of peer-to-peer networking as a cause celebre that helped spark the movement, and also lays out the next stages of development for the Celestial Jukebox that would quash it. By placing the musical activist groups into the larger context of technology and new social movement theory, Music and Cyberliberties offers an exciting new way of understanding the technological and social changes we confront daily.