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By Root 2174 0

American and European wing of a worldwide phenomenon. When any home could be a production center, production itself scattered into a distinctly postindustrial multiplicity of places and forms. Everywhere, the advent of tape cassettes internationalized cultures, but at the same time shrank and disaggregated them. Styles of music, for example, ramified down to the level of the street and precinct, but then circulated globally. This was certainly the case with some American R&B, and with British house music too (which was also associated with pirate radio). In many countries quasi-monopolist cultural industries, often identified with the nation, found themselves challenged by proliferating clusters of independents and alternatives. One could think of them in terms of "tape worlds," by analogy to Howard Becker's "art worlds."47 Occasionally the challengers won out: in some African countries (Ghana, for example) the multinational record companies withdrew from the marketplace, complaining of rampant and unrestrained piracy. When they did, the results were by no means utopian. But more often the companies stayed, banded together with independents, and fought for new laws and police actions. Piratical and other copying were never eliminated, but they took on a symbiotic role. We are only beginning to understand the complexities of these processes of the last analogue age.

Home tapingwas thus the first truly global piracy, paradoxically enough, and it was global precisely because of its domesticity. Cassettes were cheap enough to spread rapidly even in the developing world. In many places, casual copying eclipsed commercial piracy. Tape made debates over creativity and commerce truly ubiquitous. Commercial piracy itself had become a vast enterprise, equal to any of the great multinationals. In the EEC (now the European Union) alone, 21 million pirated cassettes appeared every year, and video was set to be the next step in this "bonanza for pirates."The public often took their low prices as an indictment of the "immoral" margins sustained by the legitimate industry. Yet home taping was seen as the greater problem. Well over 85 percent of West Germans admitted doing it, and unlike commercial piracy it stood for a moral economy that threatened the "death of copyright.". Its expansion therefore posed direct challenges to "the cultural life of each country."48 In India, meanwhile, as Peter Manuel has shown, cassettes transformed what had been a connoisseurs' moral economy of bootlegging rather like that of the jazz pirates into something much bigger, more corporate, and more culturally various. Pirated tapes cornered 95 percent of the market and became an international industry. A 1979 start-up calling itself T-Series was widely claimed to pirate the backlist of the old colonial company, HMV, which had failed to keep its own copies -and in its turn T-Series denounced pirates who faked its labels. Averitable "pirate network"-or rather, a network of networks -came into being, with its own equivalents of majors and indies. Practices of parody and reinvention central to much Indian music took fresh inspiration from the proliferation, giving rise to a burst of new creativity. Digital mediawould later take advantage of these networks to produce the dizzying array of media cultures that compete on the subcontinent today.49

In other regions the implications were more directly political. The banner case was Iran, where Khomeini's speeches circulated in huge numbers of cassettes under the noses of Savak. No less a figure than Michel Foucault, who reported from Tehran for an Italian newspaper, called the cassette the tool par excellence of counterinformation: "if the Shah is about to fall," Foucault pronounced, "it will be due largely to the cassette tape." In Africa, a vibrant culture of oral poetry seized upon cassettes to renew and revivify itself under the Somali dictatorship of Siad Barre. Multiplying sequences of poems, adapting and responding to each other, recreated the flow of oral performances. Somalis took the tapes, recopied them,