Music Piracy: a Rich but Narrow History (Book Review)

Barry Kenfeld provides a welcome addition to the intellectual property rights debate in music. His book addresses the historical linkages between music piracy and the music business, and how both are deeply entangled. The fact that the author is a staff member at the special collections library at Pennsylvania State University is clear. The archival data used throughout this book is the result of a very thorough engagement with material spanning nearly a century.

Kernfeld convincingly argues that one cannot simply posit pop song piracy as the illegal counterpart of the legitimate music businesses. In fact, piracy has often prompted much-needed innovations in the music business in technical and commercial terms. Building on this argument, one could reasonably conclude that piracy is perhaps much more a part of the music industries than the record industry lobby (particularly the Record Industry Association of America, RIAA) would like us to believe.

The most pressing issue for the music business is, as Kernfeld argues, not the existence of piracy as such, but its slow reaction to the innovations and changes prompted by the so-called pirates. He substantiates this point with ample illustrations organized into three parts. The first part (chapters 1–4) focuses on printed music from Tin Pan Alley through the continued sharing of song lyrics and music on the Internet. The second and shortest part (chapter 5) explores practices of illicit broadcasting through a discussion of ‘pirate radio in north-western Europe’. Part three pinpoints the evolution of piracy in the form of recorded media, from phonograph records (chapter 6) to tapes (chapter 7), bootleg albums (chapter 8), CDs (chapter 9) and digital files (chapter 10). The book takes a legal historical perspective on the subject and illustrates this with due attention to detail.

The argument is illustrated with examples spanning history and media. Sheets that compile popular song texts (pp. 25ff), photocopied music scores (pp. 73ff), home-taped music (pp. 141ff) and shared mp3 files (pp. 200ff) were initially dismissed as a threat to the music business. They were a threat indeed, but in all cases the so-called pirates provided a new way of consuming existing music: song sheet compilations organized the texts in a way that was more appealing to audiences, much like compilation tapes and discs decades later; photocopied music often helped orchestras and choirs in sharing, internally, the music they were performing, where all members were previously obliged to buy the score themselves; and mp3 files harnessed the potential of fast Internet for distribution of music. As a result, consumers tend to like the innovative, and often effective, forms of distribution. While lobbyists argue that these ‘racketeers’ have inflicted an immoral, economically damaging, and often-illegal wrong upon the ‘legitimate industry’, they remain surprisingly silent about the innovations these illicit practices have brought. The public seemed to insist that ‘new ways of enjoying songs are more important than obedience’ (p. 7). It is thus not surprising that Kernfeld concludes that ‘the music industry’s persistent lagging behind in adopting innovative products will generate the very piracy it seeks to eliminate’ (p. 221). As such, the present-day relevance of this work for debates on the music industries and piracy is paramount.

The book is rich in historical detail and provides a compelling take on the dialectics of the music industries. Yet, in the title, I call this history narrow as well. This is mainly due to its limited geographical scope. Kernfeld focuses almost exclusively on what has been going on in the USA and Europe. The context of ‘peripheral’ markets (p. 191) is unfortunately left unexplored – many countries beyond the West would actually benefit from the central idea of this book. But the so-called ‘Third World’ countries (p. 191) are merely referred to as a problematic instance of the way the record industry claims to incur huge losses in sales. Calling these ‘Third World’ markets ‘peripheral’ is also quite ethnocentric. They may indeed be peripheral to the music market in the USA, but only in the way that the USA is also peripheral to the music market in Ivory Coast or Turkey. These countries have their own production (and concomitant piracy) and coexist with the Western markets, and are both culturally and economically much more than merely underperforming loci of US popular culture consumption. Moreover, regional connections that are part of intricate global webs are a rule rather than an exception. Holding on to an outdated centre-periphery division limits the potential relevance of this book for a global readership.

Indeed, ‘pirates’ in much of West Africa, to name an example with which I am familiar, are innovating in the distribution chain, too. If there is no formal distribution and proximity sales are rife among pirates, perhaps this is the way legitimate CDs can still find their way to music lovers. Or, when MP3s are shared via Bluetooth and USB sticks, greater efforts should be made to tap into the markets where smartphones are the primary means to share and listen to music. As such, the ‘legitimate’ part of the music business has as much to learn from the practices of these ‘pirates’ as it does from the historical evidence provided by Kernfeld.

Nevertheless, the book is important for scholars working on piracy and copyright issues, but equally relevant to policy-makers and business executives. It succeeds very well in illustrating that important lessons can and should be learned from the industry’s myopic vision on piracy. Kernfeld also shows, while more implicitly, that the rigid divide between the legitimate music industry and the illicit pirates is far more complex and contradictory than is often assumed by business and scholars alike. For cultural studies in general, this book pointedly illustrates that history matters, even for issues that seem thoroughly tied up with the recent surge in Internet use.

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First published in Cultural Studies 30(2).

Pop song piracy: disobedient music distribution since 1929, by Barry Kernfeld, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011. 288 pp., US$97.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780226431826 / US$29.00 (paperback), ISBN 9780226431833 / US$7.00–29.00 (eBook), ISBN 9780226431840.