Music Wars: Digitization and the Political Economy of Sound

Jon Cruz is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. His research interests include the sociology of knowledge; American racial history; and media. Dr. Cruz has published extensively on race and culture, particularly in popular music. Including: "Ethnosympathy: Reflections on an American Dilemma,” Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice (2003) and Nineteenth Century U.S. Religious Crisis and the Sociology of Music” Poetics, (2002). His most recent book is Culture on the Margins in which he recounts the "discovery" of black music by white elites in the nineteenth century, revealing how the episode shaped modern approaches to studying racial and ethnic cultures.