Friday 25 September 2015

Recommended book: The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music

Love you, Sage.

Check out this new text, The Sage Handbook of Popular Music, which you ought to be able to obtain from your finest local library.

It's a monster, with 35 chapters from 36 Popular Music scholars. And, it's great.

Specific to this blog, there's much discussion on digital music trends, with Sinnreich (2015) for example, debunking the myth that piracy hit the music industry by surprise. Other chapters address issues concerning copyright, copying, movie soundtracks, live music, etc.

Everything you might except, then some - including case studies of Jay-Z, Amanda Palmer, Radiohead, and all of the usual suspects.

It comes highly recommend specifically because it is extremely wide-reaching, but self-contained, given the volume of chapters included. For that reason, you might dive in to read about one particular topic, but end up learning all about something else entirely.

Throw in a few beers and some great music, and you have yourselves as good a night-in as you can have in 2015.

Twankers @musicpiracyblog

References 

Bennett, A. and Waksman, S. (Eds.) (2015). The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music. London, England: Sage.

Sinnreich, A. (2015). Music Cartels and the Demateriailzation of Power. In A. Bennett and Waksman, S. (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (pp. 613-628). London, England: Sage.

Thursday 3 September 2015

Why young people engage in music piracy

Bonneville-Roussy et al. (2013), drawing from a huge dataset involving over 250,000 participants, find that the degree of importance attributed to music declines with age.

That is not to say that older people do not care about music, but young people listen to music far more than do middle-age adults, and young people listen to music in a wider variety of contexts.

Given music piracy research finds young people as principally involved in music piracy, perhaps it can be simply accounted for by the fact that they listen to more music?

Tweats @musicpiracyguy

References

Bonneville-Roussy, A., Rentfrow, P.J., Xu, M.K. and Potter, J. (2013). Music through the ages: trends in musical engagement and preferences from adolescence through middle adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(4), 703-717.