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MP3 as Contentious Message: When Infinite Repetition Fuses with the Acoustic Sphere

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Seriality and Texts for Young People

Part of the book series: Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature ((CRACL))

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Abstract

At age nineteen, Shawn Fanning became the youthful face of rebellion when he launched his peer-to-peer music file sharing platform Napster in 1999. Alex Winter, the director of Downloaded, a 2013 documentary about Napster, describes Fanning as one of the “brilliant young minds that ignited the biggest youth revolt since Alan Freed hit the radio” (“About the Movie”). For three years, Napster allowed millions of Internet users to share their digital music collections for free, until its shutdown following a lawsuit by major record labels. Napster’s challenge to the music industry was possible because of the development of MP3s, a digital audio encoding format that decreases a file size by discarding all unnecessary auditory data. Combined with faster Internet connections and ever-increasing terabytes of memory storage in technological devices, the lossy data compression characteristic of MP3 files enabled the alternate, “underground” circulation of music through Fanning’s software.

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Authors
  1. Larissa Wodtke
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Winnipeg, Canada

    Mavis Reimer (Canada Research Chair in Young People’s Texts and Cultures, Professor of English, Dean of Graduate Studies) (Canada Research Chair in Young People’s Texts and Cultures, Professor of English, Dean of Graduate Studies)

  2. The University of Winnipeg, Canada

    Nyala Ali (Master’s in Cultural Studies) (Master’s in Cultural Studies)

  3. The University of Winnipeg, Canada

    Deanna England honours degree in Psychology (Master’s in Cultural Studies) (Master’s in Cultural Studies)

  4. Geez magazine, Canada

    Melanie Dennis Unrau (contributing editor) (contributing editor)

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© 2014 Larissa Wodtke

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Wodtke, L. (2014). MP3 as Contentious Message: When Infinite Repetition Fuses with the Acoustic Sphere. In: Reimer, M., Ali, N., England, D., Unrau, M.D. (eds) Seriality and Texts for Young People. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137356000_13

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