New Book by ODU Prof Focuses on Emerging Digital Music Industry

Tim Anderson

Old Dominion's Tim J. Anderson explores the rise of the "social musician" and popular music distribution services, including Spotify, Pandora and iTunes, in his new book, "Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy: Problems and Practices for an Emerging Service Industry."

Published by Routledge, the book is Anderson's second. It follows "Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording," which was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2006.

"My first book documented the technological and cultural changes involved in moving from an economy built around live performance to one based on the sale of recordings," Anderson said. "This new book focuses on the music industry as it struggles with its position surrounded by digital audio files and networked computers that listeners use today."

"Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy" does not offer a definitive statement about the new music industry, Anderson says, but shines a spotlight on practices and services that are replacing an "object-based" industry tied to sales with one focused on "services." Issues covered in the book include licensing of intellectual property, the entrepreneurial "social musician" and audiences as end-users who can help produce and distribute work.

Anderson is an assistant professor of communication at ODU, where he teaches courses on New Media Technologies, Communication Criticism and Analysis, Popular Music Industries, and Post-industrialism and the Humanities. A faculty member since 2008, he has also published a number of journal articles on subjects including popular music, film and the television show "Mad Men."

For more information about "Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy" visit its Amazon book page.