ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with copyright and music. Its stress on the material geographies and practice challenges the norms of debate that have been dominated by concern with the immaterial and the virtual. The chapter argues that such conceptual and practical focus on de-materialization has obscured, or distracted, analyses to such an extent that it has rendered invisible the geographical. Not surprisingly, debates have been dazzled by technological changes, to the extent that they have—erroneously—displaced other concerns. The premature announcement of the “death of distance” being a case in point. The chapter argues for the need to turn our attention to the social and spatial embedding of musical practice if we are to fully comprehend its emergent forms in the “digital age.” This chapter is positioned against the notion of a “digital age”: a term that is associated with teleological theories of development. Moreover, it is a term that has deep roots in the writings of conservative futurists (Bell 1973, Toffler 1980), and much of the contemporary “technology commentariat” spun out from Wired magazine (Kelly 1998). A telling critical exposition of such writing can be found in the exploration of the “Californian Ideology” (Barbrook and Cameron 1996).
