The chapter historicises the economics of music in the current age of technological automation – from the invention of intellectual property to the implementation of lock-down technologies at the turn of the twenty-first century. The first section sketches the basic characteristics of music’s technological, legal and political economies. By the late twentieth century, the precarious markets for music – enclosed within large-scale cycles of boom and bust in the nineteenth century – had morphed into a relatively stable set of intersecting industrial networks, including print, radio and phonograph. The second section sketches a transition period for the music industry in the context of distributed digital networks that emerged after the Cold War, producing a disjuncture between practice and policy. The third section traces the dialectics of intellectual property regimes pertaining to digital rights management, arguing that a covert allomorphism of the law effectively disabled both technical and legal functionalities pertaining to music.

To an extent that nobody else has managed, the copyright industries have been able to bake protection for their rights into the very infrastructure of the internet. The challenge of limiting illicit file sharing is similar to many of the other difficult issues – like addressing offensive content, removing defamatory posts, or limiting the flow of misinformation – in internet regulation. How do you control what users do online without directly going after individual users? Legal actions against individuals are expensive; they only really make sense in high value cases. Changing the behavior of many individuals on a large scale is much more difficult, whether it’s users sharing copyrighted music and films or people using the internet to harass others. Any effective answer has to involve technology companies and internet intermediaries in some way, because they have the power to influence large numbers of users through their design choices and policies.

In August 2017, several hundred white nationalists marched on the small university town of Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally turned tragic when one of the protesters rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. The Washington Post characterized the protesters as “a meticulously organized, well-coordinated and heavily armed company of white nationalists.”1