About the Book

This book is a work in progress. A living document, of sorts. Start reading now, and it will grow month by month. Just don’t get it wet, and never feed it after midnight.

Music is both culture and commerce. Those two things are inextricably linked. In different periods of history, music culture and music commerce are profoundly different.

In the age of print, the main way in which music was produced, distributed and consumed was on paper. Music was dots on a page. The electric age, with its introduction of recordings and broadcasting, radically transformed the ways in which music made meaning for people, and consequently the ways in which it made money.

And just as the electric age was profoundly disruptive to the musicians, businesses and fans of music when it first came along, so too is the digital age.