Returning to a Pre-Print Culture Understanding of Music :: Web Internet Technology Essays

Returning to a Pre-Print Culture Understanding of Music If the Web applied science like Napster is eventually incompatible with the current print based put down industry, which values individual works (i.e. lands, CDs, videos) as commodities, then the ikon of the current music industry will have to be changed drastically. To link up the gap, something akin to cable answer, which uses a flat rate for basic service and then has add-ons like pay-per-view world power be used to curb or at least contain free dissemination of files while restrained remaining lucrative. This does not change the current industry paradigm so much it simply awards more commodity status to approach shot than product. be July, Bertelsmann and Napster CEOs met to discuss a subscription p contrivancenership. Between the two of them, the price for a subscription to the impertinent Napster was floated at somewhere between $4.99 and $15 a month (Alderman, 171). The line with this solution is that many people may not be volition to pay for something that they have in the past acquired at no cost. It has been comparatively easy to bypass security limitations placed on Napster, and in addition, like applications have appeared to compete with Napster, or replace it in the event that access is blocked (i.e. Morpheus, Gnutella, Aimster 2). A more effective solution might be one similar to what Grateful Dead lyricist John Barlow proposed in a 1994 issue of Wired Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain the gasses of digitized expression We will need to get an entirely new put together of methods as befits this entirely new set of circumstances (Alderman, 20). To completely change the paradigm might involve handout back to a pre-individualist, pre-high capitalist system. To keep the industry lucrative, the question that record labels, musicians, and other industry types should be asking themselves is not How can we bring out money usi ng existing copyright laws in the networked purlieu? save How can we still survive as an industry in an environment where copyright does not? A possible alternative, and an option that hearkens back to pre-print culture, is that musicians might be salaried on the basis that they provide a service. Their art would be free for public enjoyment, but the musicians themselves would be compensated on salary to ensure that music continued to be made at its current rate.