The metamorphosis of music-listening and the (alleged) obliteration of the aura

This is the published version of a chapter published in Sounds of the Overground: Selected papers from a postgraduate colloquium on ubiquitous music and music in everyday life. The metamorphosis of music-listening and the (alleged) obliteration of the aura. In: Nedim Hassan & Holly Tessler (ed.), Sounds of the Overground: Selected papers from a postgraduate colloquium on ubiquitous music and music in everyday life (pp. 58-71). Introduction Peer-to-peer-based (p2p-based) file-sharing is but one part of a wider process of digitisation of media content. However, file-sharing in its current mode (most notably facilitated by protocols/applications such as BitTorrent, Gnutella, SoulSeek, and DirectConnect) is one of the most notable, controversial aspects of digitisation of media content, in two central respects: Firstly, that it is so widely established as a user-led media distribution infrastructure and secondly that the absolute majority of content circulated effectively does so in violation of international copyrights. As this paper was written for a conference on popular music, I will mainly focus on this musical content , primarily in the form of mp3 files. Music, encoded as discrete mp3 files, was also the particular artefact that 'broke the mould' for the debate on file-sharing, as the infamous Napster application surfaced around the turn of the millennium. Since then, various applications and networks have come and gone, yet the overall situation of a general condition of ubiquitous, mass-scale, widespread, unregulated sharing seems to have been consolidated, prompting arguments – both among commentators and among the file-sharers themselves – of a latent 'inevi-tability' or 'unstoppability' of sharing. While technology remains unequally distributed throughout the world, I will concentrate on those parts of the Western world where it has over the last decade become arguable that file-sharing is the new norm for cultural consumption when it comes to 'previewing' films or TV series and for acquiring discographies of musical material, or for making available one's own personal media archive to others in a convenient way. This is especially the case in younger demographic groups in countries like Britain and Sweden, where I have conducted my empirical research. This wider process of intensified, more convenient technical reproducibility of audiovisual material can be directly related to Walter Benjamin's famous essay from 1935 which is often referred to as 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. As with Benjamin's pioneering understanding of film in the 1930s, the present era of digitisation constitutes …