iTake-Over: The Recording Industry in the Digital Era

Abstract

iTake-Over: The Recording Industry in the Digital Era. By David Arditi. NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. 165pp (hardcover). Figures, Notes, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-1-4422-4013-1. $65 The History of Music Production. By Richard James Burgess. NY: Oxford University Press, 2014. 245pp (paperback). Illustrations, Notes, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-01993-5717-8. $26.95 The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media. Edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson. NY: Oxford University Press, 2013. 817pp (hardcover). Figures, Notes, Bibliographies, Companion website, Index. ISBN 978-01997-5764-0. $160 David Arditi's book addresses the widespread assumption that the digital music revolution has somehow damaged the recording industry by considering several areas of actual data and situating them within larger cultural environments. Identifying a trend he calls the "piracy panic narrative," Arditi's specific areas of focus include the recording industry's response to consumption expansion through the disintermediation of manufacturing costs and commodification of new platforms, its influence on copyright law to benefit from emerging digital technology the intensification of musicians' work as labor (not artistry), and the changing nature of recorded music's digital distribution with how the industry performs surveillance on consumption. Throughout the book, Arditi consistently responds to industry-initiated narratives (whether artist- or label- or RIAA-generated) with concrete data either directly to refute or contextualize within a larger framework, thereby arriving at a more credible conclusion. The strength of Arditi's writing is in this construct, and it can be terribly effective: even in the first chapter, he calmly sets up the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's (IFPI) analysis of the dwindling retail value of music in the United States between 1995-2009 and then contrasts it with Nielsen SoundScan numbers from the same period, which show a remarkable increase. However, he is also careful to consider wider issues with the same technique, such as later in that same chapter where he compares dwindling album sales according to SoundScan with global single sales from IFPI. Perhaps the most successful point Arditi drives home is that of the traditional process where the artist, in receiving a necessary advance from the label to make a recording, signs away their royalties and hence logically cannot truly be "injured" by peer-to-peer sharing or stealing, the latter of which he also effectively deconstructs with an impressive postmodern panache. The perspective of the individual musician is one that is often lost in discussions of the music industry in the digital era, and it is clear that Arditi's primary motivation springs from this consideration. His discussion of musicians' labor, the example of Metallica (particularly Lars Ulrich's 2000 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee), and 360 deals is a particularly damning portion of the book that serves to articulate the contradictory notion of how musicians are perceived to be treated versus how they actually are, especially as a result of the "piracy panic narrative." The fact that this part is sandwiched between a sobering analysis of the industry's lobbying efforts to shape copyright law and a description of its Orwellian practices to monitor consumption for optimal capitalistic interests resulted in a fair amount of disillusionment on the part of this reader, ultimately positive for an overarching perspective yet often difficult to swallow. The only weaknesses of Arditi's book are purely cosmetic: infrequently, he utilizes the present tense when discussing events of a few to several years in the past (which can be somewhat confusing, however not enough truly to distract), the optical quality of several graphs suffers from non-optimal contrast choices (even within an understandably cost-conscious grayscale printing environment), and hence some are rendered prohibitively difficult to discern; in addition, the index is conspicuously not exhaustive. …