A Critical Guide to Intellectual Property by Mat Callahan

Author:Mat Callahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786991164
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2017-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

8 | MEET THE NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS

Copyright and continuity in the contemporary music economy1

Jim Rogers

Introduction

Stories of the decline or even demise of the music business at the hands of online peer-to-peer file-sharing networks have been regularly relayed via news media since the advent of sites such as MP3.com and Napster in the latter half of the 1990s. The proliferation of “free” online music, plummeting record sales revenues and routine closures of physical record stores are commonly combined in journalistic and academic accounts alike to paint a picture of a digital media Armageddon.

However, such a reductionist view of developments in the music industry is far too simplistic. While digital technologies have visited various transformations upon the spheres of music production, distribution and consumption over recent years, the fundamental power structures underpinning the music industry itself remain largely unaltered. In fact, as the chapter below will illustrate, it is the continuities at the core of how the music industry performs and functions that ultimately tell the more crucial story of its unfolding in the digital era. Recent and new internet and mobile technologies may carry the “potential” to radically disrupt the interests and roles of established players in the music business, but the industry has mutated and reconfigured to sustain itself.

The music industry has been the first of the established creative or cultural industries to deal with digitalization, and in particular the challenges arising from the evolution of the internet as a medium for distribution and promotion of content. In this respect, the music industry is very much the “cultural” canary down the “digital” mine. Understanding this canary’s journey and outcome to date impels us to recognize music as an industry that evolves around the utilization of property rights. Music colonizes the breadth and depth of our environment. Increasingly, it is through the ownership and exploitation of copyrights and trademarks across a widening range of spaces and places in our physical and virtual worlds that music is commodified and wealth is generated.

The music industry has traditionally been characterized by highly concentrated ownership and this continues to be the case despite the promises and potential of the internet for disintermediation. By recognizing the music industry as an interconnected set of sub-sectors that extends beyond the record industry to encompass a range of other revenue-generating possibilities for its major players, we can see how the utilization of music and recording copyrights not only bolsters the industry in a period of technological change, but also enables it to grow despite the advent of a rare and deep financial crisis across the globe.

So, as the above indicates, this chapter challenges orthodox accounts of the evolution of the music industry in recent decades. Far from conceding that internet “piracy” is “killing” the music industry, it points to the major music copyright owners using copyright law to wrestle an increasing level of control over (and revenue from) cyberspace. Moreover, this article illustrates how major music companies and artists are increasingly shifting the emphasis onto

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