Music in the Digital Age
2012–2014 dormant Author
A book about making sense of the commerce and culture of popular music, published serially and translated into four languages.
Music in the Digital Age, subtitled “Making sense of the commerce and culture of popular music”, was an experiment in how a book gets written as much as an argument about music: published in progress on Leanpub from 2012, with readers buying in while chapters were still arriving, and translated editions appearing in German, French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.
The book applies the same lens as its radio sibling: digitalisation understood not as a technology shift but as a change in the whole ecology of practices around popular music, from how it is made and sold to how it is hoarded, shared and loved. The serial edition remains available; a conventional finished edition never followed, which is either a flaw or a very consistent thesis about books in the digital age.
