The Death and Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age

Description

The Death and Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age challenges the conventional wisdom that the internet is 'killing' the music industry. While technological innovations (primarily in the form of peer-to-peer file-sharing) have evolved to threaten the economic health of major transnational music companies, Rogers illustrates how those same companies have themselves formulated highly innovative response strategies to negate the harmful effects of the internet. In short, it documents how the radical transformative potential of the internet is being suppressed by legal and organisational innovations. Grounded in a social shaping perspective, The Death and Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age contends that the internet has not altered pre-existing power relations in the music industry where a small handful of very large corporations have long since established an oligopolistic dominance. Furthermore, the book contends that widespread acceptance of the idea that online piracy is rampant, and music largely 'free' actually helps these major music companies in their quest to bolster their power. In doing this, the study serves to deflate much of the transformative hype and digital 'deliria' that has accompanied the internet's evolution as a medium for mass communication.

Jim Rogers is a Research Fellow and Associate Lecturer at the School of Communications, Dublin City University. His research focuses on the evolving form and nature of the media and cultural industries in the digital era.

Rogers's evidence is convincing and his method of incorporating 30 industry interviews with recent investment data provides a useful balance of insight into insider views with recent statistics. The book is clear, interesting, focused and well researched. ... The Death & Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age is an impressive and important book for anyone interested in how the Internet and digitization are affecting the music industry. -- David J Park, Florida International University, USA * new media & society * The cries of distress are incessant, the doom-sayers never silent: 'the internet is killing the music industry'. Well, no! Here is a bucket of scholarly, brilliantly researched water to douse this particular hyperbolic claim of destruction-by-technology. Using Ireland as a case study, Jim Rogers carefully demonstrates how the music industry is successfully coping with its changed circumstances - as it has done, after all, for a century past. The Death and Life of the Music Industry in the digital age is a crucial (and welcome) antidote to received opinion. We need more like it. -- Brian Winston, Professor, University of Lincoln, UK Jim Rogers' carefully documented analysis is a welcome relief from the "digital deliria" often associated with discussions of the music industry. A welcome contribution to the growing literature on the political economy of the evolving media industries. -- Janet Wasko, Professor and Knight Chair for Communication Research, University of Oregon, US Mediocre academics and journalists have been claiming for years that digitalisation has killed off the music industry. This knowledgeable and intelligent survey provides a much needed counterblast against such nonsense. Rogers shows that the music business is mutating, not disappearing, and that it's as strange, contradictory and interesting as it's always been. -- David Hesmondhalgh, Professor, Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds, UK, and author of Why Music Matters