Book review: Selling Digital Music: Formatting Culture, by Jeremy Wade Morris

In Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture, Jeremy Morris explores the digitisation of popular recorded music and its impact on the music industry. Morris highlights key points in the history of the distribution and consumption of recorded popular music from the 1980’s to the 2000’s to demonstrate that the transition from physical objects, like CDs, to digital music files was not an accident, but an intentional project that required great effort from hobbyists and technologists. The book contains case studies of five different technological developments, which are identified as the most impactful contributions that led to the reshaping of the music commodity. These advancements and trends, organized into the five main chapters of the book, are software media players, metadata, file sharing, online music retailing and cloud computing. To investigate the technologies, Morris analyzes archived content, including academic research, trade articles and popular press materials. In the case studies there is close attention to the labor that went into the creation of these significant developments