UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

instability, fluidity of the very source material (i.e. a song), to say nothing about the consequences
on the level of individual interpretation or consumption.
Another question is what purpose preservation of music and memory, or memory of music, or
memory through music, may serve? The usual argumentation that it is better now to record as
much as possible because one never can tell how immensely valuable a historical source that bit of
the present may become, just does not do. A more comprehensive and engaged answer in this
respect would go in the following direction: preserving music, and in the case the popular music
heritage of Yugoslavia, the music that clearly outlasted the country to which it is still fatally tied,
both in term of musical and lyrical expression, is not just about preservation. At least not just
about the preservation of music itself, rather the preservation of a ‗network‘ of social and cultural
milieu or memories thereof, that to post-Yugoslavs today represents one of the few links to the life
of a country which gave them the formative experience. Moreover, through the music preserved
and available on the music blogs discussed below, an important part of Yugoslav history and also
interpersonal and international relations are re-lived, re-formed ... through digital preservation, cocreation
and distribution. It is, therefore, as Bijsterveld and van Dijck argue in the quote above,
through the exchange of songs, through collecting, archiving and listing that a musical past is
preserved and a collectivity (to some extent) recreated. It is clearly sharing that connects music to
memory.
Music in Cyberspace
Yet, as soon as we start speaking of sharing in DME we inevitably stumble across the topic of
music in cyberspace. The first thing that comes to mind when approaching digitised music and its
circulation in DME is the availability of (mostly) copyrighted material which in its peer-to-peer
circulation readily becomes ‗pirate‘s bounty.‘ Downloading mp3s and/or viewing audiovisuals has
become a popular pastime over the past fifteen years and has seen a quenching reaction on part of
the music industry trying to confine free file sharing and punish the ‗criminals.‘ Several P2P filesharing
services, such as Napster, Audiogalaxy (AG), etc., that were thriving at the turn of the
millennium, were forced to cease their copyright violation and were consequently shut down or
transformed into payable services. Giving space to large communities of music fans and artists,
this was a clash between the DME principles of democratisation and socialising (and doing
68