[Air-L] CFP Reminder - Napster, 15 years on: Rethinking digital music distribution. A themed special edition of First Monday

[raphael nowak]

With apologies for cross-posting:


Call for papers – First Monday themed special edition
Napster, 15 years on: Rethinking digital
music distribution
 
Guest editors: Raphaël Nowak (Griffith University, Australia) and Andrew
Whelan (University of Wollongong, Australia)
 
2014
marks the fifteenth anniversary of the release of the peer-to-peer application
Napster. Developed by a student, Shawn Fanning, with the help of his friend
Shawn Parker and uncle John Fanning, Napster established music downloading as a
mass phenomenon. By 2001, 50 million users had downloaded content with Napster.
Many other applications followed – Gnutella, Kazaa, LimeWire, eMule, Soulseek,
BitTorrent, among others –further developing and entrenching p2p technology.
Online
music distribution has been fiercely contested since Napster. Online availability
has changed the way music is produced, sold, distributed, shared and consumed.
While these changes are often decried or celebrated through well-rehearsed
positions, their implications can also be exaggerated, as attending to contemporary
industry business models and persisting analog formats would suggest. 
Building
on multi- and cross-disciplinary approaches addressing developments in the 15
years since the advent of Napster, we seek papers that advance contemporary
debates associated with music downloading (authorized and illicit) and its
consequences and ramifications. We welcome 300 word abstracts reflecting on the
last 15 years in the realm of online music distribution and consumption. While attending
to this broad aim, proposed articles will also address a more specific theme. Potential
themes may include, but are not limited to: 
·      Exchange
relations and the circulation of digital objects
·      Politics and
ethics of p2p practices
·      Hyper-consumption,
curatorialism and open access music archives
·      Online music
subcultures and (social) networks
·      Domestication of
p2p and p2p as/in technoculture
·      Communications,
transfer, storage, and playback hardware and infrastructure
·      Discursive
framing: leeches, pirates, free music
·      Contemporary
music celebrity culture
·      Suppression and
criminalization of downloading and ‘copyfight’
·      Aesthetic experiences
and qualities of digital music practices and rituals
·      0day, release
groups, pre-releases and leaks
·      Affordances, affects
and materialities of the mp3 format
·      The evolution and
ecology of music downloading
·      Direct downloads,
music blogging, and online visibility 
·      Monetization,
markets and the business of p2p
·      Analog formats:
continuity and resurgence
·      Pre-histories
and futures of digital music distribution
300
word abstracts should be submitted to Raphaël Nowak (raph.nowak at gmail.com)by February
21, 2014. On the basis of these abstracts, invitations to submit papers
will be sent out in early March 2014. Full papers should be submitted by June
20, 2014, and will undergo the usual First
Monday peer-review process. Invitation to submit a full paper does not therefore
guarantee acceptance into the issue. The themed special edition will be
published November 2014.
This Call for Papers can be
found in pdf format at http://bit.ly/Nxp5k8.
Please forward as appropriate to interested parties.
 
Raphaël Nowak <raph.nowak at gmail.com>Andrew Whelan <awhelan at uow.edu.au>