This article examines the intersection between the digitization of music distribution and the reform of the copyright regime in Turkey. Since an era of economic liberalization and trade agreements beginning in the 1980s, the Turkish state has sought to update its intellectual property laws and revamp enforcement, including of copyright as it applies in music. The rise of digital media has both helped accelerate and complicated this process. While some scholarly and lay rhetoric frames digital media as revolutionary and transformative, other scholars have highlighted continuities with longer-standing phenomena in the music industries.

This article contributes to this debate through three case studies. Drawing on ethnographic and textual sources, it analyzes several issues that have persisted from the earliest days of the Turkish state’s efforts to overhaul the copyright system in the 1980s. These issues include the overall low licensing income that copyright organizations are able to collect, fraudulent or contested claims to the composition copyrights in folk music, and obstacles to licensing the re-release of albums originally released in older sound recording formats. Through these examples, the article traces threads of continuity between the pre-digital and digital era within the copyright system while also highlighting how the issues have been subtly transformed in the digital context. Ultimately, it argues that digital media act as what Latour calls mediators, which transform and modify the elements they are supposed to carry, including stubborn challenges with reforming and implementing copyright in the music industries.