This book is an economic analysis of plagiarism in music, focusing on social efficiency and questions of inequity in the revenue of authors/artists. The organisation into central chapters on the traditional literary aspect of composition and the technocratic problem of ‘sampling’ will help clarify disputes about social efficiency and equity. It will also be extremely helpful as an expository method where the text is used in courses on the music business.

These issues have been explored to a great extent in other areas of musical content—notably piracy, copying and streaming. Therefore it is extremely helpful to exclude consumer use of musical content from the discussion to focus solely on the production side. This book also looks at the policy options in terms of the welfare economics of policy analysis.