Bill Spornitz on Thu, 20 Dec 2001 00:43:10 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> The Napsterisation of Everything |
At 1:18 AM +0000 11/28/01, richard barbrook wrote: >The Napsterisation of Everything: a review of John Alderman, Sonic Boom: >Napster, P2P and the battle for the future of music, Fourth Estate, London >2001. > >Richard Barbrook snip! >Unlike earlier forms of youthful rebellion, peer-to-peer computing is a >direct threat to the economics of the music industry. Despite the rapid >changes in musical tastes over the decades, the fundamentals of its >business structure have remained the same. Musicians are contracted to make >recordings. Music is sold on bits of plastic to consumers. Copyright laws >ensure that no one can distribute recordings without paying their owners. >Everyone supposedly benefits from this arrangement. Fans are offered a wide >choice of many different types of music. Musicians are able to earn a >living - and a few can become seriously rich. Small companies can survive >by selling niche styles of music. Large corporations can own profitable >music companies as part of their multi-media empires. Having recuperated >successive cultural revolutions, this business structure appeared >to >beimmutable. There's another side to this debate that is conveniently overlooked. Even the American Federation of Musicians (the *Union*) comes out strongly against file sharing, when it is not an understatement to say that the unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted musical works is an integral part of the multi-billion dollar live music industry. In the ten years or so I played in the live *scene* I must have played thousands of songs by other artists (what we call *covers*) without any effort to compensate copyright holders. It might be foolish of me to admit to this, except that I am joined in this activity by millions of fellow musicians. Indeed, a large percentage of these cases, band leaders insist that arrangement specifics like sax solos be copied exactly from the recordings. The song is a very powerful and efficient artifact. More than stopping file trading, what these people are trying to do is, essentially, defeat the overwhelming power of song. They will not succeed. b # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net