Although file sharing has been the dominant story in the music industry throughout the 21st century, music piracy has a much longer history. Indeed, ever since copyright enshrined the ownership of reproducible music during the 18th century, there has been no shortage of musicians and publishers lamenting the refusal of others to respect their legal rights. Maintaining focus on the popular music industry, Barry Kernfeld's book does not go quite that far back in its analysis of music piracy, but it does go further than most: all the way to 1929, in fact, when ‘song sheets’ – sheets (and later magazines) containing the lyrics of contemporary hits, extremely popular in the 1930s and 1940s – first challenged the strong monopoly maintained by Tin Pan Alley publishers. What follows is a thorough account of piracy through the rest of the 20th century, first focusing on music publishing (song sheets, fake books – used by working musicians to play rough approximations of popular songs – and music photocopying, mainly by churches and schools), before considering the recording industry (early record piracy, tape and CD piracy, bootlegging and file sharing). There is a brief sojourn into pirate radio in the middle, although the different nature of the piracy (and legislation) involved makes it an uneasy bedfellow to the other chapters.
Pop Song Piracy is a work of cultural history and, as such, contains great swathes of information compiled with the diligence that would be expected of someone who works as a library archivist. It is not a work of cultural theory and it thus contains little in the way of broader theoretical exposition or discussion of the social and cultural relevance of music piracy. It does, however, contain one theoretical ‘hook’ that is very useful for understanding the broad contours of piracy. In the introduction, Kernfeld distinguishes between ‘transformational’ forms of piracy, in which ‘someone thinking outside of the corporate box’ develops a new way to access/use music, and ‘equivalent’ forms of piracy, whereby pirates merely reproduce functions already provided by the rights owners (pp. 4–7). Thus song sheets (offering printed lyrics without music), fake books (collecting large numbers of songs together for musicians to bluff knowledge) and bootlegging (releasing unreleased outtakes and live recordings) are examples of transformational uses, while music photocopying and record counterfeiting are examples of equivalent uses. Kernfeld suggests that, for all forms of piracy, song owners respond by claiming equivalence, but ‘disobedient’ practices continue because pirates and consumers recognise genuinely transformational uses. Using this typology is a handy way of conceptualising ‘disobedient music distribution’ and moves the focus to the cultural circulation of musical texts rather than merely legal ownership.
The earlier chapters, on music publishing, are the most satisfying. This is for a variety of reasons, which reflect both the strengths and the weaknesses of Kernfeld's approach. First, the action (at least in Kernfeld's account) was restricted to the USA – the book retains an avowedly American focus. Whether or not that was the limit of pop piracy at that point, the US focus enables Kernfeld to maintain a narrative that becomes harder to uphold by the time we get to tape and CD piracy. It also does less justice to the phenomenon being discussed: for example, little attention is paid to the dramatic effect that tape ‘piracy’ had on music consumption beyond the major industrialised nations. A more wide-ranging analysis of piracy would, however, have been a much larger undertaking.
The second reason for the relative strength of the publishing chapters is that the practices and the issues involved were perhaps more straightforward than later in the century (Kernfeld declines to discuss contemporary music publishers' actions against lyric websites, arguing that the issues remain the same and that, in this regard, ‘the internet is not much more than a fancy printer’ (p. 79). If they were not more straightforward, they were certainly reported in a more coherent way and this reflects Kernfeld's methodological approach of relying mainly upon media and legal reportage of piracy in order to understand the phenomenon. This approach has clearly provided a great deal of rich information for Kernfeld to work with but, at the same time, there is insufficient consideration of the social relations involved in the way the data is constructed. Alternative avenues for material that may present pirates' and consumers' understandings and beliefs in a different light (for example, interviews) are not used. These absences are not so noticeable in the early chapters (when such alternative sources may not exist) but become apparent in later discussions of record piracy and, particularly, in the chapter on file sharing (when there are many alternative sources available).
The limitation of relying on media sources comes to the fore in the way that Kernfeld uses the term ‘bootlegger’ indiscriminately, despite his later recognition that bootlegs have a transformational use not shared by other forms of record piracy and that chroniclers of bootlegs maintain strict terminological divisions (pp. 174–5). Kernfeld defends his decision to use ‘pirate’ and ‘bootlegger’ as synonymous on the basis that the ‘people involved’ have always conflated the practices (p. 175), yet this is precisely because the sources being used stem from rights-holders' perspectives. You would be hard-pressed to find any bootlegger or collector that did not distinguish between their practices and counterfeiting. Such over-reliance on media reporting results in the incorrect assertion that the Grateful Dead ‘encouraged bootlegging’ (p. 179) whereas they were in fact one of the most active anti-bootlegging bands. They were actually in favour of non-commercial tape-trading.
Kernfeld implicitly recognises the limitation of his sources in his later discussions of CD piracy and the use of industry statistics, suggesting that, whereas in earlier eras reports contained ‘a very substantial underpinning of concrete stories and usable statistical data’, by the CD era, ‘amid an onslaught of generalised hand-wringing over the illegal copying of compact discs, only a few articles provided any details’ (p. 190). This can be explained by the way that the recording industry ‘conduct[ed] a public relations campaign to create a global notion of rampant piracy’ (p. 192). This finding is itself an important one, particularly when stated by someone in such an authoritative position, but it also lends a sense of incompleteness to Kernfeld's discussions of record piracy.
These issues notwithstanding, Pop Song Piracy is an insightful and engaging trawl through the many ways that people have established alternative means of distributing popular music, and the many ways that song owners have attempted to stop them. As for contemporary relevance, the book does not offer encouragement to record labels for, although the different types of piracy take different forms, Kernfeld states that the story always ends the same: ‘the monopolists give in’ (p. 2).
