Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution since 1929 (review)

The author of this book, Barry Kernfeld, is best known as a jazz scholar. He edited the first and second editions of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, has written jazz-related articles and reference work entries, and is the author of What to Listen For in Jazz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). The book under review is not the first one of Kernfeld's to address general piracy issues in music. The Story of Fake Books (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006) describes the history of fake books as it evolved from Tune-Dex cards in the 1940s, bootlegged versions in the 1950s and 1960s, and culminated in The Real Book (1st ed., 2 vols. [Syosset, NJ: Real Book Press, 1973]), compiled by Berklee College of Music students and jazz composers in the 1970s and 1980s. There are several other books that address the topic of music piracy in different areas. To note just a few examples: Robert Chapman's Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio (New York: Routledge, 1992) is an overview of pirate radio in England; Lee Marshall's Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry (London: Sage, 2005) discusses the allure of bootlegged sound recordings through the lens of romanticism; and Greg Kot's Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized the Music Industry (New York: Scribner, 2009) documents technological changes that altered the way that listeners access sound recordings, the music industry's desire to cling tightly to an outdated paradigm for distributing and selling recordings by accusing listeners of theft, as well as artists and bands who embraced digital innovations. Kernfeld's book builds upon such earlier works on the topic, and differs from them in that it provides a general overview of the music piracy in different manifestations beginning in the late 1920s.

Pop Music Piracy covers three subject areas: bootlegging and piracy of printed music, pirate radio, and pirated sound recordings. Kernfeld outlines the major issues and summarizes the book in his thorough introduction. What struck me at first were the opening paragraphs, which describe the arrest of an eighty-year-old woman named Sarah Yagoda for purchasing bootlegged song sheets in 1930 (p. 1), and how that case is somewhat similar to recent litigation against other fans for accessing music through unauthorized channels. (Probably the most well-known example from the last several years is the ongoing case, Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas; see "Music File Sharing Case Back in Minn. Court," Duluth News Tribune, 6 January 2012.) Kernfeld covers this recent case in the latter portion of the book (pp. 214, 216). The main argument illustrates how these scenarios keep happening—and will likely continue to happen—within the context of unauthorized means of accessing and using music:

Famous musicians and powerful music corporations want to maintain a monopoly over the songs they control and to prevent others from distributing their songs without paying for the privilege. Other people want to use these songs without paying for them and without having to accept the package they come in, that is, to use them in ways the monopolists did not foresee or take into account. A struggle then follows between the two parties over obedience and disobedience. This struggle takes different forms, but in the end has the same result. The monopolists give in.

(p. 2)

The rest of the introduction discusses important distinctions between different kinds of disobedient uses of music such as "equivalency" and "transformational use." "Equivalency" is akin to strict counterfeiting of an item whereas "transformational uses" involve new or creative ways to use or access music, although they technically might still be considered illegal (p. 4). While Kernfeld covers some instances of equivalent piracy, his main focus is on transformational uses.

Part 1 of the book, "Printed Music," discusses the bootlegging of song sheets in the 1930s, fake books, and the photocopying of sheet music. Song sheets...