Noah Berlatsky reviews Alex Sayf Cummings’ Democracy of Sound, a “history of music piracy from the wax cylinders of the 1870s to the present day”:
Music has been compact and easy to reproduce since the days of sheet music. It is, moreover, intensely social: People want to share it with each other, whether by sending a YouTube URL in the 21st century, trading Grateful Dead tapes in the 20th, or copying sheet music for other singers in the church choir in the 19th.
Perhaps even more importantly, music is, and has long been, hard to pin down. A book or a painting is a physical object—but where is a song? Is it notes on paper that tell you how to sing it? Is it a live performance? Is it the recorded notes? Is a singer singing someone else’s song copying that song, or is she making a new artistic work? Turning music into property is, in other words, conceptually complicated—which is why, Cummings, suggests, struggles over intellectual property have often started, or been worked out first, in struggles over ownership of music.
The Dish 