An interesting paper about how Chinese DJs, musicians and music-lovers are using the internet to get hold of the latest music from around the world. Obviously, music-sharing is relatively old-hat to us but it's more interesting in the context of the Chinese authorities' attempts to control the population's access to foreign culture.
The paper emphasises music's subversive qualities and effects and mentions Jacques Attali who apparently sees music as a predictor of social change:
Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future. [From Noise (Amazon US, UK)]
For more on Attali, here's a 1998 essay about him and his ideas on music. (Chinese music paper via Nettime)
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