![]() While much music today is still stored and stockpiled as content-an album on a compact disc (or, less prevalently, but resiliently, on a vinyl long-playing record), a playlist or a podcast on a hard-drive or a portable digital music device-the global ubiquity of the portable internet-enabled devices marked a shift toward prevalently service-based distribution models for music. The mobile phone is rapidly becoming the most important technology today for facilitating the distribution of music in the context of potentially ubiquitous digital networking capabilities. The article will investigate the implications of these sites, whose geo-location is largely unknown by the public, for the social, cultural, and above all the financial economies of music. “The cloud” refers to an immense online computing resource, controlled by mostly private proprietors such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, as well as agencies of government. 3Ģ This article reflects on the meteoric rise of mobile smart-phone usage across the globe in the twenty-first-century and the way these devices are increasingly tethered to remote databases (popularly known as “the cloud” or “computing in the clouds”). ![]() In short, these powerful handheld computing tools have extended communication capabilities and convenience, thereby articulating new socialities in the context of changing economic realities. This extension into data applications, multimedia, and entertainment has transformed the character of the portable phone and fashioned new material relations between and across cultural, symbolic, social-interactional, political, and economic domains. As mobile-broadband services bypass those of fixed-line grids, web-enabled phones (“smart phones”) are increasingly used not only to communicate by voice but also to text messages, share information, post updates, transmit image, video, and sound files, specify geographical locations, connect to the Internet, play games, and interact on social networking sites. 2 This development affords users the world over with enhanced means for social, economic and political interaction proffering, on the one hand, new modalities of individuality and autonomy and, on the other, of interactivity, collaboration, and connectivity. The mass adoption of mobile communication devices reflects a growth rate unprecedented in the history of technologies-from a few hundred million to over four billion people in the first decade of the 21st century. ![]() 3 Although it is far from universally adopted, mobile communication has made a considerable impact in (.)ġ The convergence of wireless technology and the Internet in the first decade of the twenty-first century has given rise to integrated and powerful new portable microcomputers that are being disseminated on a broad scale.2 SRIVASTAVA Lara, “The Mobile Makes its Mark,” in Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies, James E. ![]() 1 This article is an expanded version of an earlier essay, “Divisible Mobility: Music in an Age of Cl (.).The article assesses the promise of disintermediation in relation to new formations of labor, characterized by increased entrepreneurial reliance on flexible and globalized networks of production and distribution. In the context of music’s new technological prostheses (digital recording studios, on-demand streaming services, algorithmic aggregators, and the like) the question of equitable sources of revenue for musical labor has re-surfaced as a central debate in our times. In the newer economy, medium and content are increasingly delinked the former is effectively dematerialized (or, more accurately, micro-materialized as virtualized format), thereby posing new challenges to law and policy governing musical creation, distribution, and consumption. In the older music economy, the media of music (its tangible forms-vinyl, cassette, compact disc, etc.) were fused with its contents (its sounding forms-songs, pieces, etc.), thereby facilitating their efficient circulation as physical commodities (grounded in licensing agreements, copyright protections, and so on). Music production in the 21 st century shifted from a largely commodified industrial model to a radically decentralized one, technologically facilitated by new efficiencies in search of functionality, delivery, and peer-to-peer connectivity.
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