Web207: Topic 1.3: Music

Image courtesy of http://deterritorialsupportgroup.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/wikileaks-napste/

Notes from this week's lecture and readings:

• Music has had to wrestle with digitalisation and convergence longer than other mediums because it can be compressed smaller than film and TV shows - so it is easier and faster to share than other formats
• Napster wasn't the first peer to peer site, but it was the first to get attention. This was because all users had to go through a central index which rang alarm bells with copyright holders
• P2P isn't a new concept – its been around since 1969 with UseNet, however now with computers being able to access high speed broadband and the capacity for larger memory – P2P is now easy for the average home user. P2P has become an increasingly useful model for internet-based collaboration and networking (Wikstrom, 2010)
• With the digitalisation of music - music has had to shift from a physical product (record/tape/CD) to a service (digital format/platform)
• Lily Allen was discovered on MySpace and Justin Bieber on YouTube
• In the analogue age, it was difficult to be discovered, but now with the digital age, all it takes is for your home-baked song or video to be uploaded to YouTube and the chances of being discovered are increased (Wikstrom, 2010)
• For years the record companies had been making billions of dollars, paying as little as possible to the artist and charging as much as possible for records/tapes/CD's and concert tickets – yet it's the listeners who get punished (fined for copyright infringement) when it should be the record companies who get punished (Kot, 2009)
• When the audience is actually creating the technology – the business has to adapt. But the industry had no intention of adapting – they were a profitable controlling industry which, with the invention of CD's, now had a new reason to sell music they had already sold on vinyl years earlier...for double the original price of a record or cassette. There was no reason to change because things were just too good. In 1999 the total revenue from music sales (albums and singles) was $14.6 billion (Kot, 2009).

Reflection:

Napster did offer record companies a billion dollar deal before they were shut down, however they were turned down. If they had agreed - would iTunes be around today? We may be buying and downloading songs/shows/films from Napster instead! Shawn Fanning could be one of the wealthiest men in the tech world instead of Steve Jobs.

References:

Kot, G. (2009). Napster vs. Metallica. In Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (pp. 25-39). New York: Scribner. http://edocs.library.curtin.edu.au/eres_display.cgi?url=dc60267031.pdf&copyright=1 

Wikstrom, P. (2010). The Social and Creative Music Fan. In The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud (pp. 147-169). Polity