Pop Song Piracy
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A01=Barry Kernfeld
assimilation
Author_Barry Kernfeld
authorship
bootlegs
broadcasting
capitalism
Category=JKV
Category=KNTF
commerce
commercialization
compact discs
consumption
copying
copyright
distribution
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fake books
history
improvisation
jazz
law
live performance
lyrics
media
mp3
musicians
new releases
nonfiction
phonograph
photocopying
piracy
pirated editions
popular music
profit
publishers
radio
sharing
song sheets
sound recordings
tin pan alley
Product details
- ISBN 9780226431833
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2011
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The music industry's ongoing battle against digital piracy is just the latest skirmish in a long conflict over who has the right to distribute music. Starting with music publishers' efforts to stamp out bootleg compilations of lyric sheets in 1929, Barry Kernfeld's "Pop Song Piracy" details nearly a century of disobedient music distribution, from song sheets to MP3s. In the 1940s and '50s, Kernfeld reveals, song sheets were succeeded by fake books, unofficial volumes of melodies and lyrics for popular songs that were a key tool for musicians. Music publishers attempted to wipe out fake books, but after their efforts proved unsuccessful they published their own. "Pop Song Piracy" shows that this pattern of disobedience, prohibition, and assimilation recurred in each conflict over unauthorized music distribution, from European pirate radio stations to bootlegged live shows. Beneath this pattern, Kernfeld argues, there exists a complex give and take between distribution methods that merely copy existing songs (such as counterfeit CDs) and ones that transform songs into new products (such as file sharing).
Ultimately, he contends, it was the music industry's persistent lagging behind in creating innovative products that led to the very piracy it sought to eliminate.
Barry Kernfeld is on the staff of the Historical Collections and Labor Archives in the Special Collections Library of the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Story of Fake Books: Bootlegging Songs to Musicians and What to Listen for in Jazz, and he is the editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz.
