ABOUT THIS BOOK

From ancient times to the present day, writers and thinkers have remarked on the unique power of music to evoke emotions, signal identity, and bond or divide entire societies, all without the benefit of literal representation. Even if we can't say precisely what our favorite melody means, we know very well what kind of effect it has on us, and on our friends and neighbors.

According to Aram Sinnreich, this power helps to explain why music has so often been regulated in societies around the globe and throughout history. Institutional authorities ranging from dynastic China's "Office to Harmonize Sounds" to today's copyright collecting societies like BMI and ASCAP leverage the rule of law and the power of the market to make sure that some musical forms and practices are allowed and others are prohibited.

Yet, despite the efforts of these powerful regulators, musical cultures consistently devise new and innovative ways to work around institutional regulations. These workarounds often generate new styles and traditions in turn, with effects far beyond the cultural sphere.

Mashed Up chronicles the rise of "configurability," an emerging musical and cultural moment rooted in today's global, networked communications infrastructure. Based on interviews with dozens of prominent DJs, attorneys, and music industry executives, the book argues that today's battles over sampling, file sharing, and the marketability of new styles such as "mash-ups" and "techno" presage social change on a far broader scale.

Specifically, the book suggests the emergence of a new ethic of configurable collectivism; an economic reunion of labor; a renegotiation of the line between public and private; a shift from linear to recursive logic; and a new "DJ consciousness," in which the margins are becoming the new mainstream. Whether these changes are sudden or gradual, violent or peaceful, will depend on whether we heed the lessons of configurability, or continue to police and punish the growing ranks of the mashed up.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Aram Sinnreich is assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University.

REVIEWS

"The greatest strength of this book is the broad, interdisciplinary range of its appeal: audiences interested in musicology, digital rights, street culture, and many other subjects will find it interesting, and it is written in a style that members of the general public would also appreciate. It is a book that could be assigned to undergraduates who are music majors and for courses in which intellectual property is a theme."—Elizabeth Losh, author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes

"Young people who make new music by sampling existing work, who 'mash up' existing cultural materials to convey entirely new messages, have been portrayed as thieves and copyright violators. Yet, as Aram Sinnreich eloquently teaches, what they are actually doing is pioneering new forms of cultural creation."—Howard Rheingold, author of Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier

"Aram Sinnreich is a sage guide to the emerging, perplexing, and downright vital world of configurable culture. He brings together a potent combination of deep academic learning, leading industry analyst credentials, and performing artist street cred. No one knows better than Sinnreich how music and technology are co-evolving."—Michael Heller, author of The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives

"Mashed Up is an intellectual / emotional romp, filled with insights into the pleasures and paradoxes of our high-tech musical universe. Aram Sinnreich is an original thinker, a brilliant brother, and a bad mammajamma."—David Ritz, author of Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye

"A passionate and informed assessment of a transitional moment in the popular music industry, couched within a larger scholarly dialogue about the changing distinctions between cultural producers and consumers in an era of new technological and expressive possibilities. . . . Mashed Up provides a necessary addition to emerging concerns within Cultural Studies regarding issues of intellectual property. . . . The book is a significant contribution to studies of the reproduction of cultural objects in the digital age."—Cultural Studies

"Mashed Up is a sustained and concrete examination of one particular kind of contribution practice: the work of mashup artists and its effect on the social and aesthetic assumptions of modernity."—Criticism

"In Mashed Up, Sinnreich uses music as the lens to study the increasingly relevant gray area between media production and consumption. . . . I have always found Sinnreich and colleagues' 2009 study on configurable technologies to be an indispensable framework for my research. I am pleased to see that work has now been extended into a book."—Journal of Communication

"Sinnreich's book would appeal to a variety of audiences: from scholars interested in studying music culture, intellectual property and technologically mediated subcultures, to use in a graduate seminar in media studies, rhetoric and technology, or cultural studies."—Journal of Popular Culture

"Mashed Up does an excellent job of bringing to the fore and making sense of the epochal shift signaled by configurable music. . . . Although musicians and commentators have, for decades, viewed jazz and other improvised musics as potential harbingers of social change, surprisingly it is the 'configurable' culture detailed by Sinnreich that might actually offer the blossoming of a new era of socially integrated musics that induce more democratic, participatory futures."—Critical Studies in Improvisation

"Aram Sinnreich systematically examines how configurable technology and culture have brought music into a new era."—International Journal of Communication

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations... xiPreface... xiiiAcknowledgments... xxi

IntroductionThe Bust... 1

Part I. When the Mode of the Music Changes... 131 Music as a Controlled Substance... 152 The Modern Framework... 413 The Crisis of Configurability... 69

Part II. Drawing Lines in the Sand... 914 Yes, But Is It Art?: The Art/Craft Binary... 955 Some Kid in His Bedroom: The Artist/Audience Binary... 1076 Something Borrowed, Something New: The Original/Copy Binar... 1247 Live from a Hard Drive: The Composition/Performance Binary... 1488 Hooks and Hearts: The Figure/Ground Binary... 1599 "He Plays Dictaphones, and She Plays Bricks": The Materials/Tools Binary... 170

Part III. The Lessons: Configurability and the New Framework... 17910 Critique and Co-optation... 18111 "Plus Ça Change" or Paradigm Shift?... 193

Notes... 209Index... 227

EXCERPT

Introduction

The Bust

On a gray, windy afternoon in January 2007, on a quiet street in downtown Atlanta, a team of thirty or forty law enforcement officers, dressed in S.W.A.T. gear, armed with assault rifles, and accompanied by drugsniffing dogs, burst through an unmarked door. After arresting their two targets, they confiscated several items, including cars, computers, bank statements, and electronic equipment. Most important, they found the contraband they'd been looking for: tens of thousands of "mixtape" CDs, none of them officially licensed by the recording industry.

This was hardly a back-alley counterfeiting operation. For one thing, the CDs in the studio, though slated for retail distribution, contained material that can't be found on the shelves of Wal-Mart or in the catalog of the iTunes Music Store. For another thing, the targets of the raid were two of the most famous names in hip-hop. The suspects, Tyree "DJ Drama" Simmons and Donald "Don" Cannon, were partners in the Atlanta-based Aphilliates Music Group, co-owners of the raided recording studio, and producers of the wildly successful Gangsta Grillz mixtape franchise -- a CD series on which songs by new and established hiphop performers were remixed, assembled in a playlist, and rapped over by guest vocalists. After being charged with felony violations of Georgia's Racketeering Influenced Corruption (RICO) law -- typically used to fight organized crime -- each suspect was released on $100,000 bail. The raid was organized and overseen by members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a trade group that represents the interests of record labels. The 81,000 CDs seized at the Aphilliates studios¹ were only a tiny fraction of the millions of unlicensed mixtapes confiscated each year; however, due to the high profile of this raid's targets, it became national news, and sparked nationwide debate and protest. Brad Buckles, the executive vice president of the RIAA's antipiracy division, explained that it was a cut-and-dry matter of crime and punishment. As he told an MTV reporter shortly after the raid, "We enforce our rights civilly or work with police against those who violate state law... If it's a product that's violating the law, it becomes a target."²

Many fans and commentators questioned the logic of this argument. After all, the Aphilliates had been working with the blessings of their accusers. The RIAA's member labels were some of their biggest customers, often paying $10,000 to $25,000 just to have the company produce a single mixtape for one of their artists -- largely for the sheen of authenticity it provided, but also for the additional marketing and distribution clout represented by Atlanta's mixtape network. Major hip-hop acts like T.I., 50 Cent, Jay-Z, and Sean "Diddy" Combs gained early prominence on mixtapes, and continued to rely on them heavily even after achieving mainstream success. True, it was a legal "gray area," as DJ Drama acknowledged when we spoke,³ but up until then, the record labels had been equal partners in the aff air.

Why would the recording industry organize a felony bust of their own business partners, for manufacturing the very products they'd been paid to produce? Why risk alienating the same fans and communities that they'd paid so handsomely to court? Why demonize some of the industry's most successful producers, among the few who reliably bring new acts to national prominence, as record sales continue to slide precipitously? As Ted Cohen, a music industry con sul tant and former major label executive, told the New York Times, it was just a matter of the music industry being "schizophrenic" -- of the "right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing."⁴ Ultimately, however, this is more of a description than an explanation. What caused this "schizophrenia?" Why can't the recording industry decide whether DJ Drama is its savior or its nemesis?

These questions lie at the heart of this book. We are living in times of ambiguity, confusion, and contradiction that reach far beyond the boundaries of the music industry. On the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, traditional warfare between standing armies has been supplanted by clashes between military contractors and "enemy combatants." On the trading floors of New York and London, traditional stocks and bonds have been joined by increasingly esoteric securities comprised of repackaged debt. In America's corporate headquarters, factories buy and sell the rights to dump carbon dioxide and other pollutants into our atmosphere. We no longer have a clear notion of where the lines may be drawn between soldier and civilian, asset and liability, consumption and conservation. And the price of this uncertainty is mounting crisis -- political, economic, and ecological.

This is a moment of profound change, a moment when the old definitions no longer apply, and when the new definitions have yet to be written. Although the change is fueled by such forces as accelerating technological innovation and globalization, these terms don't tell us much about either its causes or its potential eff ects. I argue in this book that we may gain a wider understanding of the situation, and even glimpse the grains of the emerging social order, by examining a smaller discursive crisis and its emerging resolution: namely, the struggle over musical culture and practice in the age of sampling and file sharing.

Throughout history, musical aesthetics, practices, and technologies have been at the center of countless battles and debates over the shape of society. This is because music possesses a unique power to reflect, transmit, and amplify what Cornelius Castoriadis⁵ (echoing Lacan) calls the "social imaginary" -- even when it is devoid of explicit lyrical or symbolic denotation. Some acts of musical regulation and resistance -- such as the prohibition, preservation, and transformation of African musical forms in the antebellum American South -- have carried explicit political connotations for all parties concerned. The great bulk of battles, though, have taken place without any conscious acknowledgment of their larger significance. When a shop keeper plays classical music to keep teens from hanging out in his parking lot, or when those teens bring a boom box to counter his sonic claim over the space, neither action is taken as anything more than instrumental. Yet the consequences of these actions, especially in aggregate, ripple throughout the larger geographical, economic, and political landscapes.

Clearly, my definition of "resistance" differs somewhat from the standard Gramscian model. Far from being "organic intellectuals," fighting hegemonic power in the interest of class-consciousness, the resisters I describe in this book are mostly interested in circumventing regulatory hurdles for practical purposes. A DJ would never get any work done if he had to clear the copyrights for every sample he used; far better just to make the music, and hope to fly under the radar of the recording industry's legal departments. Nonetheless, the impact of the DJ on today's hegemonic institutions couldn't be more destabilizing if it had been plotted in the back room of a smoky café by a cabal of wild-eyed insurrectionists.

My argument is framed in terms of cultural production and its relationship to power and material production; this fact would appear to locate my work squarely within the field of cultural studies. However, I believe a more appropriate philosophical home for this book lies within an emerging interdisciplinary field that Siva Vaidhyanathan6 has recently dubbed "critical information studies," or CIS. Like me, scholars in this field are concerned with "the ways in which culture and information are regulated, and thus the relationships among regulation and commerce, creativity, science, technology, politics and other human affairs."⁷