Product Description

Since the mass proliferation of the Internet, music has been the one art form that has seen the most attention online. This volume culls together essays that examine the cultural aspects of music existing online. More than just the notion that "people download," Cybersounds is the first collection that critically looks at this issue, ultimately presenting new ideas and directions for exploring this field.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1487323 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 282 pages

From the Back Cover
"The writers offer an illuminating cybersurfing safari out to the point break where art, commerce, community, self, and politics converge. The result is a smooth ride to a fresh new shoreline of twenty-first century cultural criticism. The essays are comprehensive, well crafted, theoretically informed, empirically grounded, loud, clear, alive, and kicking." Donna Gaines, sociologist/journalist; Author of Teenage Wasteland and A Misfits Manifesto

"Cybersounds is terrific. It takes readers inside the many sorts of cyberscenes now being developed by inventive people creatively using the Internet to build community among music makers and fans. We see the emergence of new means of controlling entry, norms of communication, identity formation, politics, and ethics in these worlds where flesh and machine begin to merge. These emergent scenes are set in the context of the technologies, laws, and business models that make them possible and shape/stunt their growth, and we learn of the musical creativity lost as well as the creativity gained in the process." Richard A. Peterson, Co-Editor with Andy Bennett of Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual

About the Author
Michael D. Ayers is a Visiting Professor at Manhattan College and holds degrees in sociology from Virginia Tech and the New School for Social Research (New York). He is the co-editor of Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice (2003) and a contributing music critic to Billboard.com, Giant and the Village Voice.

Customer Reviews

Academically Grounded But For the Most Part An Informal Presentation
Writer, researcher, freelance music journalist and Visiting Professor at Manhattan College, Michael D. Ayers has assembled several international experts with impressive credentials who explore the recent phenomenon of the Internet music revolution, wherein there has been a convergence between artists, capitalism, fans, media, technology, and music itself. The result is an excellent compilation of essays featured in Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture that present an insightful analysis of topics that up to now were lacking in technical sophistication in their discussions.

In bringing together these experts, these contributors have done a remarkable job in breaking down into their basic components such hot- button issues as the legal challenges that surround music and the Internet; the birth and evolution of cyber communities; how technology is used to frustrate corporate interests; questions about transformation and how cyberspace has affected the way we appreciate music from a passive to an active role; the question of power and regulation, for as Ayers states, "music in the on-line world has pushed the envelope;" the emergence of the Apple's iPod; how bands use their websites in branding themselves and how fans interact; how music and on-line activism have come together; how fans challenge the recording industry and trade their own home made recordings of live concerts; how artists and DJs work together over large geographical spaces to create new kinds of music, and also how new technology as digital recordings in cyberspace allow for new creativity; the effects of bootleg trading and peer to peer file trading, as well as the restructuring of the patterns of music distribution and consumption.

These are only a sampling of the huge territory that this book covers and as Jonathan Sterne, one of the contributors asserts, "Cybersounds offers us an unprecedented opportunity to reflect on music on the Internet and the state of scholarship about music on the Internet."

In an academically grounded but for the most part informal presentations, this is a remarkable collection of essays that break new ground in educating readers on the convergence of cyberculture and musicology. Moreover, thanks to these contributors the door has now been opened where the study of these two disciplines has been greatly advanced.

Norm Goldman, Editor Bookpleasures