Information wants to be free, and digital technology liberates it like no other medium in history.
Thus speak the digerati, anyhow, and often as not in tones suggesting that they're bringing us the best news since the Annunciation. While fired-up MP3 evangelists speak glowingly of a future in which recording artists use the Internet to deliver their songs directly to fans, without having to rely on the record labels distribution networks, industry doomsayers point to the rampant online piracy MP3 enables. Popular music more broadly defined has, after all, existed since long before there was a record business and will surely survive its passing. Nor is the information economy, in any case, likely to fail to find some new way to wring money out of music once the old-fashioned way becomes impracticable. Though MP3 proponents are fond of using the rhetoric of revolution to describe their aims, the cultural transformation they promote is potentially more unsettling than most of them imagine.