[ecrea] CFP Napster, 15 years on: Rethinking digital music distribution. A themed special edition of First Monday

Call for papers – First Monday themed special edition

Napster, 15 years on: Rethinking digital music distribution



Guest editors: Raphaël Nowak (Griffith University, Australia) and Andrew 
Whelan (University of Wollongong, Australia)



2014 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the release of the peer-to-peer 
application Napster. Developed by a student, Shawn Fanning, with the 
help of his friend Shawn Parker and uncle John Fanning, Napster 
established music downloading as a mass phenomenon. By 2001, 50 million 
users had downloaded content with Napster. Many other applications 
followed – Gnutella, Kazaa, LimeWire, eMule, Soulseek, BitTorrent, among 
others –further developing and entrenching p2p technology.

Online music distribution has been fiercely contested since Napster. 
Online availability has changed the way music is produced, sold, 
distributed, shared and consumed. While these changes are often decried 
or celebrated through well-rehearsed positions, their implications can 
also be exaggerated, as attending to contemporary industry business 
models and persisting analog formats would suggest.

Building on multi- and cross-disciplinary approaches addressing 
developments in the 15 years since the advent of Napster, we seek papers 
that advance contemporary debates associated with music downloading 
(authorized and illicit) and its consequences and ramifications. We 
welcome 300 word abstracts reflecting on the last 15 years in the realm 
of online music distribution and consumption. While attending to this 
broad aim, proposed articles will also address a more specific theme. 
Potential themes may include, but are not limited to:

·      Exchange relations and the circulation of digital objects

·      Politics and ethics of p2p practices

·      Hyper-consumption, curatorialism and open access music archives

·      Online music subcultures and (social) networks

·      Domestication of p2p and p2p as/in technoculture

·      Communications, transfer, storage, and playback hardware and 
infrastructure

·      Discursive framing: leeches, pirates, free music

·      Contemporary music celebrity culture

·      Suppression and criminalization of downloading and ‘copyfight’

·      Aesthetic experiences and qualities of digital music practices 
and rituals

·      0day, release groups, pre-releases and leaks

·      Affordances, affects and materialities of the mp3 format

·      The evolution and ecology of music downloading

·      Direct downloads, music blogging, and online visibility

·      Monetization, markets and the business of p2p

·      Analog formats: continuity and resurgence

·      Pre-histories and futures of digital music distribution

300 word abstracts should be submitted to Raphaël Nowak 
((raph.nowak /at/ gmail.com)) by February 21, 2014. On the basis of these 
abstracts, invitations to submit papers will be sent out in early March 
2014. Full papers should be submitted by June 20, 2014, and will undergo 
the usual First Monday peer-review process. Invitation to submit a full 
paper does not therefore guarantee acceptance into the issue. The themed 
special edition will be published November 2014.

This Call for Papers can be found in pdf format at http://bit.ly/Nxp5k8. 
Please forward as appropriate to interested parties.



Raphaël Nowak <(raph.nowak /at/ gmail.com)>

Andrew Whelan <(awhelan /at/ uow.edu.au)>



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