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In our interview we discuss not only his research on music piracy, but his views on whether traditional books face the same fate as vinyl and CDs.

'''The ingenuity of music pirates and bootleggers is astounding. You describe how people in the Communist world used x-ray plates to make records. What do you think drives people to copy and share music? Did music companies make a mistake in trying to suppress this urge through legal action throughout the second half of the 20th century?'''

That is a tough question. It’s not surprising that record labels, music publishers and the like wanted to suppress copying. No business wants to cede part of its market—or at least part of consumer demand—to anyone else, and most institutions tend to prefer the status quo. I think copyright interests often had a short-sighted view of how music could work as a business. Some artists and labels saw radio as a mortal threat in the 1930s and didn’t want their records played on the air, which seems funny in retrospect since 20 years later the labels would be plying DJs with bribes and blow to get their records on the air. Radio airplay turned out to be a great thing for selling records.

Like any historian, I’m professionally obligated to say, “It’s a combination of a variety of factors, and it was all very complicated.” But honestly, the industry did get lazy, and it was stubborn in resisting new models instead of trying to take advantage of the new possibilities offered by online distribution. This is an industry that never had a good reputation—in America, the perception of the sleazy label ripping off artists is basically encoded into our cultural DNA—and legally harassing twelve-year-olds certainly didn’t help with this image problem. Hey don't look at us. We didn't the wreck the record business.

It’s more than the labels’ folly, though. The role of the label itself is being fundamentally reimagined. Its very purpose as an institution is in question when an artist like Pomplamoose can attain Internet celebrity through homemade YouTube videos and artists can sell their music directly to fans. Labels were essentially gatekeepers, much like commercial radio or music magazines. They checked and channeled the flow of aspiring musicians that reached audiences. A&R reps scouted talent, and labels provided access to recording infrastructure, pressing plants, distribution networks, and promotion. It goes without saying that artists no longer have to go through a label to be able to record, produce, and distribute their music, although labels still have access to networks of influence and distribution that remain valuable.

I suspect it has to do with the fundamental nature of books versus music. As I try to show in the book, music has always had this intensely social nature to it: people go to a concert together, they hear a band and they can’t wait to share it with their friends. This happens with books too, but reading remains this kind of individual experience. Plus, despite the success of e-books, the Kindle, Nook, and so forth, I’d say that there’s still a good deal of inertia in the culture of reading. I’m not an audiophile and it hardly matters to me whether I’m listening to an MP3 or LP, but I do prefer a physical book to an electronic one. I like to come by my back pain honestly. Then again, I know PDF and audiobook versions of my book have circulated widely online, so who knows?

'''Finally, how would recommend using your book in a class? What themes, ideas or historical trends will your book help students understand?'''

It seems to me that we might be recovering this idea of the public good when you look at recent activism against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as well as the Supreme Court’s very good decision in the Myriad Genetics case. I’m not much of an optimist, but I think the book at least shows there’s a back-and-forth, a push-and-pull. That’s the idea behind the title—there was a “democracy of sound” in the sense that democracy involves a lot of friction, a lot of sharp elbows and contention. The fact that there has been a fight at all is a source of hope.