Online musical cultures

The Internet grew from a network of academic resources requiring specialist knowledge,\ud expensive technology and privileged access into a World Wide Web of publicly\ud accessible materials in the early 1990s. It burst into popular consciousness in 1995 with\ud the launch of easy-to-use web browsers including Netscape Navigator and then Microsoft\ud Internet Explorer. These browsers provided a user-friendly interface that allowed anyone\ud to use the HyperText Tansfer Protocol (HTTP) to find resources stored on servers in\ud other parts of a global network of computers. Combining this Web with other networked\ud communication technologies like Electronic Mail (e-mail), Voice-over-Internet-Protocol\ud (VOIP), and Instant Messaging (IM), and with data transfer systems like File-Transfer\ud Protocol (FTP) and streaming media, the Internet has become a very powerful and\ud popular means for people to communicate on a historically unprecedented scale.\ud These new technologies have been credited with “the democratization of the music\ud industry” (Price, 2008) by providing musicians with the means to write, produce,\ud distribute and promote music and related merchandise on a scale that previously required\ud the support of a large company with significant financial resources and global reach. In\ud reality, this democratization began in the 1970s with the MIDI standard for electronic\ud instruments and gathered pace with home-studio recording technologies in the 1980s\ud (Théberge, 1997). Each of these production tools incrementally reduced the cost of\ud making music and enabled musicians to record their compositions and performances at\ud home and release them into the music market. However, musicians’ opportunities to\ud access the recorded music market increased dramatically with the invention of the\ud MPEG-2 Audio Layer III (MP3) standard in 1995 (Hsieh, 2002), which enabled\ud widespread distribution of digital recordings using Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems like\ud Napster and Bittorrent