Owning the Masters

My new book, Owning the Masters: A History of Sound Recording Copyright was published by Bloomsbury yesterday. It tells the story of how this form of copyright was developed and claimed by the recording industry, and how recording artists are now claiming this copyright for themselves. The book also looks at how this copyright has been applied to different forms of distributing music - physical products, radio, downloading, streaming - and how it shapes and is being shaped by our digital age. As the blurb says, 'This is an essential subject for an understanding of the economic, artistic and political value of recorded sound'.

Like recorded music, the book comes in a variety of formats: hardback, paperback, eBook. 

Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound

Shhhh . . . you know who!

I have for a long time been interested in silent records. I wrote an article on the subject for the New Statesman in 2012 and more recently completed a chapter for Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates’ collection Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound (Bloomsbury, 2018).

            In this book I enumerate six types of musical silence: notated silence (which is dominated by John Cage’s 4’33”); phonographic Cageian silence (which pays homage to Cage’s work but regularly misunderstands his intentions); political silence (where muteness signifies oppression); memorial silence (paying homage to the dead); technical silence (which highlights the ‘silence’ of different types of recording formats); and economic silence (where silent songs illustrate issues of authorship, ownership and recompense).

            I’m sure there are more types of silence, though, and there must be silent records that I have overlooked in the chapter.

            Do let me know.