We spend so much of our lives online — from work and shopping to social networking and entertainment. But a Washington appeals court recently overturned crucial policies that ensure a fair and open internet for everyone. Net neutrality rules ensure a level playing field and prevent big corporations like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T from blocking content, increasing your bill and lowering your connection speed.

Hope you really trust your broadband company. And don’t mind the Internet getting more expensive. If a report by The Wall Street Journal is true, a new rule proposal would allow the likes of Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable to charge content providers extra for faster access to consumers. Potentially, that would mean streaming services such as Spotify, Beats Music, and Pandora could have to bill their customers more or else slow down: read more. 

At the moment, your Internet generally works like this: You pay a company — AT&T, or Comcast, or Verizon, or Time Warner — for monthly online access. Once you’re connected, you can go to whatever legally permissible website your heart desires and, whether it’s the New York Times or Netflix, it takes you the same amount of time no matter where you’re trying to go. Read more. 

From YouTube, to Pandora, to Spotify, streaming music is piloting our listening habits in fascinating new ways. Eric Harvey explores how these developments are affecting ideas of taste, access, and ownership in the 21st century.

On-demand streaming music has been part of the collective imagination for more than a century. It can be traced back to the 1888 publication of Edward Bellamy’s million-selling science fiction novel Looking Backward, in which a man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000. Amidst the mind-blowing technological developments he encounters on his journey is a “music room,” in which 24-hour playlists are piped in to subscribers via phone lines. With no shortage of astonishment, the man proclaims that “an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will” is perhaps the pinnacle of human achievement. Read more. 

The Future of Music Coalition, a non-profit advocacy organization for musicians, conducted a survey in August which revealed that 42 percent of professional musicians lacked any form of health insurance – a number that is nearly twice the national average. Thankfully, a movement is afoot to change that: read more.