Patrons, curators, inventors and thieves: the storytelling contest of the cultural industries in the digital age

This book is a rare and unusually reflective insider account of the transformational challenges of the cultural industries over the past 15 years. Opening with a fresh new perspective on music industry history, it explores how the industrial world evolves more by narrative plausibility than by strategic precision, recognizing that corporate identity, purpose and power can be both reinforced and subverted by modifications to various cultural master-plots and their traditional heroes and villains.

Of most interest are the insights into the strategic struggles faced by corporate managers and by intellectual property policymakers dealing with the seismic new millennium shifts in technology, communications and related social behaviour. Illustrating how a satisfactory 'postprivate' master-narrative of social equality in the digital age has yet to emerge, the book also helps to loosen the industrial-political deadlock in the debate over copyright reform. It is essential reading for anyone who takes an interest in the changing processes of creation, dissemination and industrialization of knowledge and culture.