Selective Bibliography of Journal Articles on Digital Sampling, 2007-2016

Maalsen, Sophia. 2016. Reissuing Alternative Music Heritages: The Materiality of the
Niche Reissued Record and Challenging What Music Matters. Popular Music And
Society 39:516-531

Increasing value is being placed on popular music as cultural heritage. This article
addresses this interest through the overlooked practice of reissue, which acts to curate and
preserve musical heritage, presenting it in a way that emphasizes music's materiality. I
will first look at the rise of popular music as heritage before looking at specific reissue
labelsSing Sing Records and Smithsonian Folkwaysthat demonstrate the
multiplicities of music considered worth salvaging and the motivations for doing so. The
reissue process is addressed, including its role in packaging music in ways that signify
and inform the listener of its cultural significance. It is argued that reissue labels rescue
underground music that is not encompassed by the two major label reissues of rock
classics or the music recognized by official heritage bodies, and therefore creates an
alternative discourse to mainstream music heritage.

Carfoot, Gavin. 2016. Musical discovery, colonialism, and the possibilities of

intercultural communication through music. Popular Communication 14(3):178-186

Discourses of discovery have been important in a wide range of musical contexts, from
early modern ideas about musical composition through to current forms of popular music
production and consumption. Across these various contexts there are often inherent
connections between discovery and colonialism, connections that become most apparent
in non-Western socio-cultural and musical settings. In this article, I situate discourses of
discovery within the "coloniality of power," noting how colonial discovery can be more
critically described as invention. From here, I turn to the genre of World Music as an
example of how musical discovery is underpinned by inherently colonial perspectives,
articulations of power, and relationships of dominance and subordination between
Western and non-Western cultures. In contrast, I present the concept of interculturalism
as a way of thinking about the possibilities of cultural in-between-ness beyond discovery,
drawing on the practices of musicians who articulate intercorporeal and intercultural
communication through performance.

Heuman, Josh. 2015. Free as in Regulated: Television Copy Protection, Cultural

Enclosure, and the Myth of User Sovereignty. Law Culture And The Humanities
11(3):445-466

Following Foucault's demystification of liberal rights, this article complicates narratives

of cultural enclosure in intellectual-property regulation, and especially their central figure
of a right-fully sovereign user constrained by copy protection. First, it problematizes the
freedom imagined for the user, as a specific and ambivalent orientation to contemporary
cultural transformation. Second, in a reading of the Federal Communication
Commission's proceedings on "broadcast flag" protection for digital television, it
reconsiders apparent constraint as productive rather than simply repressive regulation,
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which goes to constructively map uses and users in new domains of digital media.

Stanfill, Mel. 2015. Spinning Yarn with Borrowed Cotton: Lessons for Fandom from
Sampling. Cinema Journal 54(3):131-137

Stahl, Matt. 2015. Tactical destabilization for economic justice: the first phase of the
1984-2004 rhythm & blues royalty reform movement. Queen Mary Journal Of
Intellectual Property 5(3):344-363

This article examines an early (1980s) phase in a two-decade effort towards 'royalty
reform' in the US recording industry, whereby ageing African American rhythm & blues
performers sought to redress systematic underpayment of record royalties. The record
companies to which these performers had signed in the 1940s and 1950s had
contractually obligated themselves to provide biannual statements of royalty accounts,
and to pay artists record royalties, once initial costs had been recouped. Yet this is rarely
how things turned out, and many performers found themselves broke and vulnerable as
they reached retirement age, even though many of their records had remained in print and
selling for decades.
Drawing conceptually on critical race theory and social science scholarship, and
empirically on primary source and archival documents, the article outlines the 1950s
recording industry's `racialized political economy' and offers an account of singer Ruth
Brown and attorney Howell Begle's innovative and successful effort to narrate a counter-
history of fraudulent accounting practices and casual racism that helped pressure
companies like Warner Communications, MCA and Capitol/EMI into forgiving old
production debts, renegotiating 40-year-old contracts, and paying millions of dollars in
restitution through the formation and funding of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation.

Edwards, Lee, Klein, Bethany, Lee, David, Moss, Giles and Philip, Fiona. 2015.
Discourse, justification and critique: towards a legitimate digital copyright regime?
International Journal Of Cultural Policy 21(1):60-77

Digitization and the internet have posed an acute economic challenge to rights holders in
the cultural industries. Faced with a threat to their form of capital accumulation from
copyright infringement, rights holders have used discourse strategically in order to try
and legitimate and strengthen their position in the digital copyright debate with
governments and media users. In doing, they have appealed to general justificatory
principles - about what is good, right, and just - that provide some scope for opposition
and critique, as other groups contest their interpretation of these principles and the
evidence used to support them. In this article, we address the relative lack of academic
attention paid to the role of discourse in copyright debates by analyzing user-directed
marketing campaigns and submissions to UK government policy consultations. We show
how legitimacy claims are justified and critiqued, and conclude that amid these debates
rests some hope of achieving a more legitimate policy resolution to the copyright wars -
or at least the possibility of beginning a more constructive dialogue.
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Edwards, Lee, Klein, Bethany, Lee, David, Moss, Giles and Philip, Fiona. 2013. Framing
the consumer: Copyright regulation and the public. Convergence: The International
Journal Of Research Into New Media Technologies 19(1):9-24

With illegal downloading at the center of debates about the creative economy, various
policy initiatives and regulatory attempts have tried (and largely failed) to control,
persuade and punish users into adhering to copyright law. Rights holders, policymakers,
intermediaries and users each circulate and maintain particular attitudes about appropriate
uses of digital media. This article maps the failure of regulation to control user behavior,
considers various policy and academic research approaches to understanding users, and
introduces an analytical framework that re-evaluates user resistance as expressions of
legitimate justifications. A democratic copyright policymaking process must
accommodate the modes of justification offered by users to allow copyright law to
reconnect with the public interest goals at its foundation.

O'Keeffe, Tadhg. 2013. Performance, Materiality, and Heritage: What Does an

Archaeology of Popular Music Look Like?
Journal Of Popular Music Studies 25(1):91-113

Sag, Matthew. 2009. Copyright And Copy-Reliant Technology. Northwestern University

Law Review 103(4):1607-1662

Zuberi, Nabeel. 2007. Is this the future? Black music and technology discourse. Science-
Fiction Studies 34:283-300

As a dispersed assemblage of ideas and aesthetics, sonic Afrofuturism operates across the
porous borders between and among music, SF, the academy, journalism, and the
blogosphere. In this article I am interested in the value of these rhetorics for media
studies. In particular, how can writing that focuses on the materiality of music inform our
understanding of the technological changes associated with digitization? I will argue that
music forms, commodities, and practices provide ample evidence of the continuities as
well as discontinuities in the mediascape. Today's popular music culture is marked by the
mediations of the past, even as recorded sounds take on more informational
characteristics. I also seek to ground the technological sublime of Afrofuturist poetics in
the widespread social practices associated with records, sound-system dances, and music
networks. Underpinning the sonic imagination in techno-centric writing and music-
making are the quotidian practices of music cultures, the more "worldly" fictions behind
"sonic fictions," to borrow Kodwo Eshun's suggestive adaptation of literary and visual sf
for music recordings. This paper examines the material possibilities of techno-discourse
for transnational media studies through a discussion of digital sampling, and points to the
limitations of technological utopianism in relation to writing about music and black
bodies.