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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2010
The emergence of the compact disc in 1979 was regarded as the likely sales salvation of recorded music, and for many years the CD reigned supreme, generating steady, often substantial, company profits. More recently, however, the music industry has painfully slipped a disc. The CD has been in sharp decline, propelled mainly by young consumer ire over price and format inflexibility and by Internet technology available to skirt or subvert both. Irish American traditional music has not been impervious to this downward trend in sales and to other challenging trends and paradigm shifts in recording and performing. Amid the tumult, Irish American traditional music has nevertheless shown a new resilience and fresh vitality through a greater do-it-yourself, do-more-with-less spirit of recording, even for established small labels. The five recent albums of Irish American traditional music reviewed here—three of which were released by the artists themselves—exemplify a trend of their own, preserving the best of the past without slavishly replicating it. If the new mantra of music making is adapt or disappear, then Irish American traditional music, in adapting to change free of any impulse to dumb down, is assured of robustly enduring.