ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the common elements constituting the conventional narrative of music online, before attending specifically to two particularities of the relation between music and technology that tend commonly to be muted or overlooked altogether. The first described as the configurations of practice around music sharing as a mediated social activity. The second referred to as the sociability of digital audio, which means that music online “talks to it”, largely because, from its emergence, digital music has by design and affordance been miniature and open to manipulation and reassembly. Copyright-holding bodies went to extraordinary lengths in advancing specific and legally consequential definitions of the musical work as a kind of property. The Moving Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer 3 (mp3) is in some respects a private format, best experienced in isolation, through headphones. The format is subject to degradation over time and through extensive duplication: mp3 files can come to exhibit various audible forms of digital file corruption.
