Andrew Leyshon's book joins the long list of works that address the transformation of the music industry since the advent of the MP3. Reformatted does offer a potentially innovative perspective, however. Leyshon is an economic geographer by training. Thus, he looks at the digital economy in spatial terms. On first experiencing compressed musical files, he decides they are an ‘inherently geographical phenomenon’ (p. 4). On the one hand, they would enable ‘music to move through time-space in new ways’ (p. 4). On the other hand, MP3s were ‘going to have important implications for the organization of the music industry’ (p. 5).

A combined focus on the zeroes-and-ones of cyberspace and the bricks and mortar of music industry institutions is retained throughout this book, coming together in Leyshon's conceptualisation of the ‘network’. Reformatted examines how the traditional networks of the musical economy have been affected by the virtual networks of the Internet. This is not to say that the book achieves balance between these two strands, however. Leyshon provides more insights when examining the residues of the physical environment than he does when exploring the new vistas of the digital world.

In Chapter 2 Leyshon modifies the work of Jacques Attali (Reference Attali and Massumi1985) to look at the ‘sequential processes’ of the musical economy (p. 21). In his view, these are creativity, reproduction, distribution and consumption (p. 25). Leyshon addresses each stage of this sequence in turn to determine which have been most affected in the digital era. The geographical focus pays dividends here, providing an alternative to some of the more dramatically transformative claims that have been made for the Internet. Leyshon suggests, for example, that some aspects of the creative process will continue to be located in ‘established centres of the musical economy’ (p. 37), notably the key cities in which musical scenes have clustered. In contrast, physical geography has rendered other areas of the musical economy more vulnerable, including some aspects of creativity that have been digitised.

In Chapter 5, Leyshon provides a close examination of one of these areas: the recording studio sector. Here too the geographical focus is profitable. Leyshon views studios as ‘socio-technical spaces that use … space, time, technology, expertise, and “emotional labour”’ (pp. 118–19). He is right that more work needs to be done in this area and this chapter provides a useful overview of the locatedness of recording studios, both in relation to how they have been positioned within the networks of the musical economy and the way they occupy physical space. Leyshon charts the transformation of record production from the days when the ‘space in each studio was different, and the acoustic environment often developed incrementally and organically’ (p. 126), to the beginnings of the digital era when studios adopted similar consoles and thus became ‘less idiosyncratic spaces’ (p. 131), to today when ‘software and code [have] made possible a regime of more distributed musical creativity (p. 134). He also conducts useful interviews with studio owners, providing fresh insight into their plight.

In contrast, Chapter 3, which focuses on file-sharing peer-to-peer networks, offers less that is new. The history of downloading platforms – including their diffuse geographical nature – has been told before. Moreover, the idea that these networks represent a ‘gift economy’ is itself widely shared. In Chapter 4 Leyshon examines new business models that have been developed by record companies in response to ‘the crisis of the musical economy’ (p. 7). Here the more general comments about the music industry are also well trodden. This chapter does, however, benefit from illuminating interviews that he has undertaken with representatives from three types of record company: a ‘music conglomerate, an online subsidiary of a large record company, and an independent artists and repertoire company’ (pp. 89–90). In this respect, it is a shame that he did not interview staff from EMI, whose decline is the subject of Chapter 7. Instead, he is largely reliant on Southall's (Reference Southall2009) history of the company here.

There is a good reason why some of Leyshon's analyses are familiar. This book is primarily compiled from a series of journal articles that he published (sometimes in partnership with other authors) between 2001 and 2009. These do not appear to have been substantially updated for this monograph; as such what might have been novel at the time of original publication has now become part of common parlance. Another consequence of this approach is that some aspects that would now be foregrounded are not covered in great depth. This is most notable in the case of streaming, which only receives a handful of mentions in the book. The advantage of Leyshon's method, however, is that we get a sense of the preoccupations of the industry and of academics as events unfolded. He states in the Introduction that his work is devoted to a ‘close attention to the present’ (p. 5). In taking us back to a series of present moments, this book provides a window to the recent past.

In his Afterword, Leyshon takes the opportunity to analyse the latest present time. Here we gain a greater sense of his ability to probe the digital environment. He provides a well-tempered account of the change in revenue streams and is particularly acute when contemplating the affordability of a popular music career. His work here made me think anew about the pros and cons of personal and recording advances. Leyshon argues that ‘the traditional music industry recording contract at least had the merit of providing a guaranteed income to artists over a fixed period of time’ (p. 166). It was thus a means by which the impecunious could undertake a musical career. In contrast, the newer type of entrepreneurial artist is more likely to have a background ‘where there are plentiful reserves of social, cultural, and financial capital’ (p. 168, emphasis in original).

Ultimately, one of the oddities about this book is that it could have been more geographical. As a reader I found myself wanting to know more about the physical and human consequences of the transformed music industry. Consequently, I was left feeling there is yet more to be written about digitisation and its effects.