I am currently a Professor in Media and Cultural Studies in the Communication Arts department at the University of Wisconsin Madison. My research interests include the current state of the popular music industry, new media and digital culture, the transition from software to “apps”, and the technologies of music production and consumption. I also completed a post-doc at the University of Ottawa for a project entitled ‘You Can Patent That? The Business of Technology Patents’ with Dr. Michael Geist, and received my PhD from the department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University.
My first book, Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture is available, courtesy of the University of California Press. It documents the transition from music on compact discs to music as a digital file on computers. I have also been part of two co-edited collections: one with Eric Hoyt about podcast preservation called Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography and the other with Sarah Murray, about apps called Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps. I was also the music editor and a resident podcaster at Midnight Poutine, a local blog about music, food, art and other cultural events happening in Montreal, for 5 years.