Culture Clarifications
After closing the last post and not intending to revisit it immediately. I find myself heading in that direction anyway. In a fairly parallel scenario to iTunes' and other similar sound bite samples of songs constituting a performance, a Federal Court has ruled that ring tone versions of songs do not represent a separate billable concert performance of a song for songwriter royalty purposes Judge: Cellphone Ringtones Are Not Concerts | Threat Level | Wired.com. I'm sure some might say there is a certain marked spirit evinced in even asking additional payment for such ephemera. More of it is dullness and lack of imagination.
These 30 second battles though are merely skirmishes in a larger and more centrally contested battle. One between the Record Labels, their traditional products and marketing, their shrinking profits and shrinking seat at the table and the new entities and technologies in the popular-music consumption game. Internet Music concerns pay both performer and song-writing royalties, whereas traditional radio pays only song-writing royalties. This can amount to a lot of money. A century of wrangling had worked out that a certain benefit or value was supposed to flow to the performer of recorded music by its being aired over the radio and being heard being known. In the new millennium all bets were off and The performance rights act is being snaked through congress to deal with it
Radio "pay to play" law ready for vote in House, Senate - Ars Technica. The NAB is not amused.
Largely, it doesn't currently concern what I care about. The various tribes of indie music are not where the money is. Smaller internet radio and non-profit radio have different less onerous fee structures. This essentially seems to be a battle of big business with the emphasis on big. I can watch this one from the sidelines
At the same time it seems a good point to further emphasis the point I made in the last post. Mass reproduced pop music, dependent on mechanical mass consumption, is more related to other like mass pop cultures, and less to music culture even for being music. It is not like going to see a live performance of a string quartet, a Mariachi band, or even a busker on a city sidewalk. Pop music culture is not Music culture. Not strictly even a subset of it. Pop music is also a partial thing as created, even in the hands of your favorite band (fill in name of your favorite band / artistes here {_______} ) It does not become whole, let along develop its final value until an audience reaction is achieved until a general opinion or affinity is rendered and registered. Until the people decide what it signifies, as its multiplicity of performances grinds through its moment.
I put together a reading list on pop music culture a few months, books I knew were in the library where I work, with the intent of reading a few things that might place this in a more rigorous context. I might dig that out. On preview I feel strongly that the complex interplay of popular music culture, the publics role in the distributed nature of its valuation speak against simplistic notions of property rights the record labels hold. Craft intellectual property entities like pop music have copyrights as a reward and living convenience to the creator and were not intended to become another category of permanent and generalized property. It impoverishes a societies culture to treat it that way.
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