New tools and practices for electronic music distribution

Apart from the traditional uses of computing in the fields of music and musicology, human-computer systems are emerging in reaction to this tradition, which is already effective, though still young.Whereas these unique systems operate in the usual fields of music' s expansion, they cannot be systematically referred to known musicological categories. On the contrary, the experiments made possible by these systems inaugurate new uses where listening, composing and music transmission are merged in a gesture sometimes described as "music-ripping".We will show how music-ripping practices provoke traditional musicology, whose canonical categories are powerless for our purpose.To achieve this purpose, we will:- give an explicit minimal set of categories sufficient to underlie the usual models of computer assisted music;- do the same thing for human-computer (anti-musicological?) systems which existence is disturbing to us;- examine the conditions necessary to reduce the second set of categories to the first;- conclude on the nature of music-ripping.