Patrick Burkart

Trends in Digital Music Archiving

This article assesses changes in the mode of music consumption from record collecting to digital archiving and subscribing to a music service, and argues that the subscription model is unviable. First, it considers the change in the perceived source of value of the music commodity going from tangible to intangible formats. Then, it tracks the trade-offs made by music consumers who exchange purchasing recordings for subscribing to music download and streaming services, and notes the imbalances in favor of the intellectual property rights owners. Then, it analyzes the features that appeal to the collectors psyche enough to capture the collector into a “digital enclosure.” It concludes with an analysis of the incommensurability between the activities of the music collector and those of the music service user.

Loose Integration in the Popular Music Industry

The Big Four music oligopoly practices cultural gate‐keeping for global markets. However, in spite of consolidation in the sector, the music industry is more loosely integrated vis‐à‐vis the rest of the entertainment industry than it was under the Big Five. As the sector concentrated, it also differentiated into two ownership classes. The Big Four are evenly split, two with affiliations with entertainment conglomerates and two without such affiliations. However, the majors as a group continue to share strong market power as a cartel. In the future, the interaction of the two affiliated and unaffiliated dyads in online music markets may divulge coordinated rules for CD pricing and controlling over access to digital catalogs. This paper considers Internet distribution of music as a technology practice contributing to, and perhaps reinforcing, loose integration.

Geopolitics and the Popular

When Popular Communication made its debut in 2003 as an independent, but affiliated, journal of the International Communication Association, editors Sharon Mazzarella and Norma Pecora stated in their Editors’ Introduction to the first issue that a primary intellectual challenge of the journal was to break free of the productivist bias of the media studies of its time and to investigate the ways in which “communication is ‘made popular’” (Zelizer, 2000, p. 312, as cited in Mazzarella & Pecora, 2003, p. 2). In the process, the editors proposed that the implicit distinctions between popular communication and popular culture could be clarified for exploring culture as communication. The second team of editors, Jonathan Gray, C. Lee Harrington, and Cornel Sandvoss, internationalized the scope of popular communication studies and pushed for a broader range of theories and methods to be represented. In 2013, your new editors reflect on popular communication scholarship through the prism of world events and their underlying dynamics. This special issue on geopolitics considers culture and communication as variables changing together in relation to global structures and processes, without resorting to the productivist bias. Our approach marks a departure from much of the more recent work in the field, which considers culture as foundational for social reality and popular communication as its basic expression, whether in reception or in more indirect processes. Ten years of research and theory published in the journal reveals many approaches to popular communication, including political economy, which illustrate how communication is made popular as a consequence of changing political, economic, and technological factors. To take it a step further, we should assert that today geopolitics is not only about conflict and conflict resolution but also about national re/positioning strategies.

Music in the Cloud and the Digital Sublime

The paper reviews the “celestial jukebox” model of digital music distribution in light of its recent transformation into “cloud”-based music services. Elaborating on a prior history of the celestial jukebox business model, the paper identifies continuities with services built around music portals, updates the legal and business strategies of the most popular cloud-based services, compares core functionalities of cloud-based services, and discusses the cultural significance of an international youth movement opposed to the celestial jukebox under various national “pirate parties.” It speculates that the pirate parties envision counter-reforms to global information policy that are culturally environmentalist in their worldview.

Piracy and Social Change

As guest editors for this special issue on piracy and social change, we re-engage a line of inquiry in critical media studies on popular communication begun in prior issues of Popular Communication. This journal’s previous editors and contributors have already recognized the role of piracy in altering media economics and in promoting cultural reproduction in ways that promote or suppress the popularization of certain kinds of communication. Bielby and Harrington (2010), for example, noted how piracy alters TV marketing strategies, while Baym (2010, 2011) linked piracy to a general retooling of music for export markets and Adejunmobi (2011) linked piracy to deflationary economics in national film industries. Text-centered approaches have assessed how piracy assists popular communication by increasing the diffusion and impacts of cultural texts and paratexts (Gray, 2011; Pearson, 2010). Since then, Castells and Cardoso (2012) solicited cultural studies research on the topic of piracy in another journal, the International Journal of Communication, and even more recent books on the subject (Andersson Schwarz, 2013; Burkart, 2014) add new facets to social studies of piracy. This special issue on piracy and social change presents new popular communication scholarship as seen “through the prism of world events and their underlying dynamics” (Burkart & Christensen, 2013, p. 3) and using a variety of scholarly perspectives. In much communication research, online file sharing is still approached as a novel form of media distribution and consumption, yet it underlies the rationale for the Internet protocol suite; it is now more than 15 years since Napster’s emergence as a commercial platform for file sharing (Nowack & Whelan, 2014), and infamous sites such as The Pirate Bay have entered a decade or more of existence. The turn from legal studies to critical communication literature on piracy

Competition's Eclipse: Brazilian Wireless Telephony

This article considers the postprivatization dynamics of Brazils market for mobile cellular telephony, which is already the largest in Latin America and the Caribbean and is likely to grow further, albeit within the constraints of an oligopoly. Reforms in the wireless sector focused on maximizing foreign direct investment at privatization. In combination with external events and a spurt of mergers and acquisitions, the phased-in competitiveness plan for the telecommunications sector permitted the formation of a national oligopoly. As a result, and despite careful attention paid by reformers to the competitiveness of the sector, conditions for effective competition have not emerged.

Piracy and Social Change: Roundtable Discussion

This roundtable discussion draws together researchers with an interest of overcoming purely juridical treatment of piracy in their work. Christopher Kelty and Gabriella Coleman consider the aspects of cyberculture, which conflictually engage with intellectual property rights, through various communities of technology practice, including hackers. Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi’s work on fair use addresses the growing opportunities for creators in the United States to utilize the tradition in their creative fields. Jonas Andersson Schwarz and Patrick Burkart, co-editors of this special issue, have researched user motivations and political activism around copyright and software patent reforms, partially explaining the emergence of dozens of European Pirate Parties, beginning with the Swedish Pirates in 2006.

Popular Communication, Piracy and Social Change

Digital piracy cultures and peer-to-peer technologies combined to spark transformations in audio-visual distribution between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s. Digital piracy also inspired the creat ...

The international political economy of the hack: A closer look at markets for cybersecurity software

ABSTRACT This article examines the development of hacking and cybersecurity software packages as commodities, based on an international political economy of vendors and clients operating in the interstices of international law. Offensive hacking and defensive cybersecurity tools offer new means for surveillance of critics, journalists, and human rights workers, especially in corrupt or authoritarian political systems. The article provides a case study of the Hacking Team, an international “cybersecurity” firm offering spyware and surveillance systems to government security agencies, which was itself hacked and “doxed” in 2015. The leak of documents contributes new knowledge of an international political economy for software products, which exploits the digital rights of targets and which could further undermine general Internet security.