About

Aram

April 11, 2012

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Hi, I’m Aram Sinnreich, a professor at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information, and bassist for NYC soul band Brave New Girl.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 I’ve been researching the intersection of music, technology and politics since 1997, when I was first hired by the dot-com consultancy Jupiter Research (now a division of Forrester), where I eventually ran the Music and Policy research divisions as a senior analyst. My first book, entitled Mashed Up: Music, Technology and the Rise of Configurable Culture, was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2010, and I’ve published many articles over the years for outlets such as The New York Times, Wired, and Billboard. I also co-founded the media/tech consultancy Radar Research, where I served as Managing Partner until 2012.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 This project began in 2010, when I was retained as an expert witness for peer-to-peer file sharing service LimeWire. I wrote a 20,000-word expert report to support my testimony, summarizing my research findings on the economic and social impact of P2P, but the case was settled the day before I was scheduled to testify. I decided to expand my report to a book-length project, and the text you find on this site is the result. Though the book uses very little of the report’s text, the underlying questions and some of the approaches I take to answering them are directly related to the work I did on that project.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 I’m thankful to the MediaCommons project for providing me with a platform to share this draft, and I look forward to your contributions as the work progresses. Any constructive criticism, advice or feedback will be reflected in the final version of the book, and any commenters who use their real names will be thanked in the book’s Acknowledgments section.