Cybersounds,
Essays on Virtual Music Culture
by Michael D. Ayers, Editor
Peter Lang, New York, 2006
282 pp. Paper, $32.95
ISBN: 978-0-8204-7861-6.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@hogent.be
Twelve essays on music and the Internet.
One can imagine that copyright issues
(Napster and KaZaa et al.), fandom, and
online collaboration will be treated in
depth, and so they are, but there is a
lot more in this collection. What keeps
the whole bunch together is an ethnographical
and anthropological viewpoint and a high
quality of scholarship, so editor Michael
Ayers, professor of sociology and music
critic, has kept up his end of the bargain.
What makes it an interesting book is the
inclusion of a few essays that break new
ground, which is a rare quality in view
of the high number of recent publications
on the sociology of music in the digital
age and on the influence of technological
advances in the production and consumption
of music.
Markus Giesler contributes Cybernetic
Gift Giving and Social Drama: A Netnograpy
of the Napster File-Sharing Community.
Borrowing from anthropological theories
of gift giving, he stages the story of
Napster and its descendents as a social
drama (drama in the sense
of anthropologist Victor Turner: a social
process with relatively high visibility
and very clearly recognisable protagonists,
developing round an issue that takes on
high symbolic significance for both actors
and viewers). In a questionable but interesting
argument, Giesler concludes that file
sharing is practically the only example
of gift giving without a trace of egoistic
interest. This leads to specific moral
consequences and a high potential for
social change or at least some social
upheaval, which genuinely deserves the
epithet of drama. (By the
way, he pulls Moses Maimonides, Marcel
Mauss, Marshall Sahlins, Derrida and Caillé
into the mêlée, so these
are fingerlicking pages for any social
anthropologist.) Gieslers penchant for
coining new words and drawing in just
a little bit too many epistemologically
diverse theoretical frames cast a shadow
over the essay, but it offers undoubtedly
a big step forward in understanding the
cultural dynamics of file sharing.
Andrew Whelans Do U Produce?:
Subcultural Capital and Amateur Musicianship
in Peer-to-Peer Networks presents
a Bourdieusian analysis of virtual communities
of amateur musicians and,
thus, establishes a solid basis for a
discussion about the very nature of music.
The fact that he distinguishes between
amateur and professional is echoed, if
inversely, by the concluding essay of
the book: Jonathan Sternes On
the Future of Music. Sterne quite
rightly points out that the analysis of
the effects of the Internet on the production
and consumption of music has been too
narrowly focused on the professional,
or rather the industrial field of production
and on records and mass media as distribution
channels. Amateur and local production
with its much tighter feedback loops tends
to be left out of the picture while it
is exactly that part a part where
a lot of pure fun competes with high levels
of uncensored creativity that gets
a boost from the net.
The feedback loop in industrial music
production is unquestionably mainly impersonal
and purely functional: sales figures,
airplay and (nowadays) numbers of illegal
downloads tell the managers, professional
producers and marketers something about
the audiences appreciation of an
album or recording. Again, the Internet
is changing the situation, as Daragh OReilly
and Kathy Doherty illustrate in Music
B(r)ands Online and Constructing Community:
The Case of New Model Army. How the
NMA band branding leads to a feeling among
fans of belonging to a virtual family
and how that family feeling again helps
the brand is much more interesting than
what we usually read about Deadheads and
their relationship with their grateful
favorites. (I must add that this has absolutely
nothing to do with my personal taste
I dislike both the GD and the NMA, but
the composers I prefer wouldnt have
fan clubs, would they?)
There are six more essays in the collection,
but one needs to be mentioned separately.
Trace Reddells The Social Pulse
of Telharmonics: Functions of Networked
Sound and Interactive Webcasting is
the odd one out because it mainly describes
the work of the author and a number of
music projects that specifically exploit
the technical potential of the web. I
heartily welcome his categorisation of
networked music projects and interactive
webcasting, but wrapping it in a rather
pompous rhetoric wasnt necessary.
Actually, referring to Debord, Bakhtin
and their likes doesnt make the
whole thing more intelligible. Entia
non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,
sayeth Occam.