About the Book

This book is a work in progress. A living document, of sorts. Start reading now, and it will grow month by month. Just don't get it wet, and never feed it after midnight.

NEW AND EXCITING: There's now also an AUDIOBOOK version...

Music is both culture and commerce. Those two things are inextricably linked. In different periods of history, music culture and music commerce are profoundly different.

In the age of print, the main way in which music was produced, distributed and consumed was on paper. Music was dots on a page. The electric age, with its introduction of recordings and broadcasting, radically transformed the ways in which music made meaning for people, and consequently the ways in which it made money.

And just as the electric age was profoundly disruptive to the musicians, businesses and fans of music when it first came along, so too is the digital age.

The way to navigate such changes is to understand them. In order to adapt to the new environment and thrive it’s important to make informed, deliberate and progressive responses that are appropriate to the opportunities new context – rather than fearful, reactive and conservative ones that view the new environment simply as a threat and as chaos.

This book aims to provide a guide to those changes – not to tell you what you should do – but so that you can make intelligent, rational and strategic choices about your own music business, or so that you can come to understand the changes in the ways in which music is used and understood as part of our new and increasingly dominant music culture.

This is a work in progress

I have decided to publish Music in the Digital Age as a book under construction. I intend to update it regularly (though not too frequently) and build up towards a completed work by the end of 2012. All updates will be free to purchasers of the book.

Knowing that there is an audience reading the book - some of whom who have paid money to do so - will be more than enough motivation for me to continue on my quest to put together the most coherent and comprehensive expression of my thoughts, observations and conclusions about music in the digital age.

Understanding popular music commerce and culture online

For the past decade, I've sought to understand and articulate principles of online music commerce and culture for the digital age. This book captures and condenses those ideas - and provides a road map for thinking about independent music business and popular music culture online.

This book will not tell you how to get famous on the internet, nor which marketing techniques are the best ones to use to sell your record. Neither does it pretend to predict the future. Instead, it steps back from the media environment, and tries to answer the bigger questions about 'what's going on?' and 'what does it mean?'.

I believe that only from the base of a solid understanding of the digital environment and the ways in which people make meaning from music can reliable and sustainable strategies and practices be developed for music business. There is no single way of 'doing music online' successfully.

That said... the book contains practical suggestions as well as philosophical reflection on general principles. The idea is that understanding the context and the opportunities inherent in the digital age will help you formulate your way of doing music online successfully.

Revisiting old material

The vast majority of Music in the Digital Age is brand new. However, I use as its starting point and raw material nearly a million words published on New Music Strategies and on my personal blog over the years as well as a wealth of research in my role as Reader in Music Industries Innovation at Birmingham City University.

It revisits, develops and comments upon my free ebook The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online - but also goes into greater depth about the nature of online media and the ways in which popular music culture and popular music commerce work in the new technological environment.

This book has been written as a general introduction to the music industries online, and focuses on innovation & entrepreneurship, the media environment, and a demystification of what it means that music is on the internet.

About the Author

Andrew Dubber  

Andrew Dubber is Reader in Music Industries Innovation at Birmingham City University. He's a member of the Centre for Media and Cultural Research, and is Award Leader for the MA in Music Industries (which can be studied online via distance learning from anywhere in the world) and also runs the MA in Music Radio.

He is the founder of New Music Strategies, a pan-European music consultancy and strategy organisation focusing primarily on non-commercial and social projects that use music to improve lives. He is also a member of the Board of Advisors for Bandcamp.

He can be found online at http://andrewdubber.com

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