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The use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is evidentially growing steadily across all sectors and industries. This includes in the creation and development of music, which raises some interesting copyright questions about authorship, ownership and infringement. This chapter will look at the impact of AI on these principles of copyright in the context of music creativity.

Following on from the previous chapter which considered the impact of artificial intelligence technology on copyright and the music industry, this chapter considers another type of technological develop; blockchain. This chapter discusses the use of blockchain technology in copyright registrations, licence and payments, and copyright enforcement.

This chapter reviews recent empirical evidence on skill-building among low-income youth and adults in the United States. It focuses on skills and credentials that are well-rewarded in the labor market and the different means of attaining them. It reviews benefits and limitations of college attendance for disadvantaged youth and adults. It also considers alternatives to higher education (high-quality career and technical education, models of work-based learning and sectoral training for youth or adults. A caveat is that good post-secondary education and workforce programs will mostly not make up for poor K-12 academic preparation. The need for other policies to strengthen early education outcomes, or to provide incentives to and assist workers whose skills will remain very poor, remains in effect.

This chapter starts discussing approaches regarding well-known arguments like ‘partisan dealignment’ and ‘de-freezing’ process of traditional socio-political cleavages within a scenario marked by ‘cognitive mobilization’ and new forms of engagement, which appear to be nowadays more fragmented, creative, fostered by post-bureaucratic bodies and develop in different political arenas (like the sub-political ones). This is a basic point since it drags the rise of a sort of new (ideal)type of citizen: the critical and monitorial one. It is then a frame much different from the one of only few decades before that has to be considered in the analysis of the relationship between society and politics in our time.

Essential concepts, conceptions and categories such as citizenship, polity, socialization, identity, are discussed in a wider way throughout this second chapter. The relation between citizenship and democracy is debated by reference to the classical and Marshallian concept. But the notion of democratic citizenship is also widened in this chapter taking into consideration conceptions like ‘affective citizenship’ and then going beyond the formal and classical idea of this concept. This is also the chapter where a fundamental sociological process as the (political) socialization and the construction of political identity is analysed along with implications concerning the integration of citizens in their own community. In this respect the theory of social capital and the relevance of the function carried out by institutions of the community (that is neo-institutional theoretical approach) are discussed in the frame of a political integration perspective.