The recording industry regularly paints its consumers as pariahs waiting for new technologies to hurt the very musicians they love. In Music Technology Panic Narratives Beyond Piracy: From Taping to Napster to TikTok, Dr. David Arditi examines how the major record labels single-out new technologies as if they will bring an end to recorded music. They use what he calls the “piracy panic narrative”—a narrative in which new technologies threaten the very existence of recorded music. The pirac...

iTake-Over: The Recording Industry in the Digital Era sheds light on the way large corporations appropriate new technologies related to recording and distribution of audio material to maintain their market dominance in a capitalist system. All too commonly, scholars have asserted too confidently, how the rise and reign of digital music has diminished the power of major record labels. In iTake-Over, music scholar David Arditi argues otherwise, adopting a broader perspective by examining how...

Over the past two decades, corporations and venture capitalists have adjusted business models to change the digital world. As a result, the global economy has undergone a massive shift, changing the way we work, consume and pay for things. Under this new ‘digital feudalism’, we find precarious employment via digital platforms, we buy goods and services in perpetuity through subscriptions, and we pay for it all with debt.Digital Feudalism explores this new moment in capital...

The explosion of services such as Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, Apple Music, Amazon Prime and YouTube, which allow us to access content at the click of a button, has turned the norms surrounding cultural consumption upside down. How has this shift to an apparently unending supply of content affected the way we consume our favourite binge-worthy show, blockbuster movie or hot new album release?Positioning streaming alongside a major shift to contemporary capitalism, David Arditi demons...

Record contracts have been the goal of aspiring musicians, but are they still important in the era of SoundCloud? Musicians in the United States still seem to think so, flocking to auditions for The Voice and Idol brands or paying to perform at record label showcases in the hopes of landing a deal. The belief that signing a record contract will almost infallibly lead to some measure of success— the “ideology of getting signed,” as Arditi defines it—is alive and well....

This edited collection analyzes the role of digital technology in contemporary society dialectically. While many authors, journalists, and commentators have argued that the internet and digital technologies will bring us democracy, equality, and freedom, digital culture often results in loss of privacy, misinformation, and exploitation. This collection challenges celebratory readings of digital technology by suggesting digital culture's potential is limited because of its fundamental relat...

Populism raises awkward questions about modern forms of democracy. It often represents the ugly face of the people. It is neither the highest form of democracy nor its enemy. It is, rather, a mirror in which democracy may contemplate itself, warts and all, in a discovery of itself and what it lacks. This definitive collection, edited by one of the worlds pre-eminent authorities on populism, Francisco Panizza, combines theoretical essays with a number of specially commissioned case studies ...

Stolen in Paris: The Lost Chronicles hits home with the teenage genius search for truth in all of us.Ernest Hemingway's first wife lost a suitcase full of prized manuscripts on a trip home from Paris. These missing stories were never to be seen again. Who knows what literary classics that suitcase may have contained?In the imagination of this author have been found those missing memoirs—a series of twelve exciting adventures, with more to come, found by way of "biographic f...

The Handbook of Critical Music Industry Studies provides students and researchers with the means to think about how the performance, recording, and publishing of music could be if we do things differently. People are hungry for a more equitable music performance and recording system. The industry exudes patriarchy, white supremacy, cultural imperialism, ableism, and worker exploitation. In the context of gendered (e.g., #MeToo and #TimesUp) and racialized (e.g., Black Lives Matter...