The Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press

Unavailable books and temporarily
free downloads

Nothing is free

You can temporarily download, free of charge, any of the three books listed below. Making these books available costs me (Philip Tagg) money, but much less than the original hard-copy prices shown in brackets after each title. Therefore, please donate to the running of this site. Then this free book download service can still be available for others than just you.

It is alchemy to believe, as advertisers would have us do (like stock exchange gamblers), that you can ever have something for nothing (except maybe parental love as a young child). Maybe you think that providing nothing in exchange for the value you derive from using goods or services created by others is your divine right, that you need do nothing to gain everything. I fail to see any logic in such bizarre assumptions.

As for these books, not paying anything for them affects their long-term availability (negatively) as much as making a small contribution affects their availability positively. I ask for no contribution from a student in a developing nation who cannot afford even $5 (2 or 3 € or £) for a book, but I do ask most students in my part of the world because many of them will pay $5 for a beer or a fast-food snack without batting an eyelid. And as for those who...

Downloading

To download, free of charge or for the price of a very small donation, any of the three books listed below:

1. Click the title of one of these three books:

• Ten Little Title Tunes ($75 - pay $0, save $75! - donate)
• Fernando the Flute ($19 - pay $0, save $19! - donate)
• Kojak: 50 Seconds of Television Music ($35 - pay $0, save $35! - donate).

2. Fill in one of the three online forms just listed and press Send.
3. On receipt of the automatic email, click the link to confirm your
     email address's veracity. This step is to stop robots from clogging up the system.
4. Wait for a second email, this time from a human, so it may take a day or two.
5. Follow the download instructions in the second email.
6. If you live in an OECD nation please donate a very small proportion of what
    you didn't have to pay for the book so that this service can be maintained for
    those who can't pay OECD prices for knowledge and ideas.

Altruism: a threat to freedom of enterprise

Just to remind you that altruism is (rightly) considered by some right-wing capitalist gurus as a threat to freedom of enterprise and a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit of the Holy Market Forces. I say buck market forces because they suck and stink. Look what they did themselves over the last thirty years to the Holy Market (this was written in early December 2008, just before it was known that Madoff made off). Putting my books online for free is a mild form of altruism and so is making a small donation towards the cost of their production. Neither you nor I need do anything altruistic. We would both gain financially by doing nothing in the short term. In fact we would gain nothing by not being altruistic because what use is the abstraction of exchange value? Money? Property? What a total drag. I do wish people would wake up and start making the world a better place instead of ‘making money’ at everyone else’s expense. How sad is that! Altruism is much more fun. The freedom to join together and act according to your collective conscience beats the hell out of freedom of enterprise.