Music, community & file-sharing: from Napster to Ping

The launch of Ping, Apple’s new Facebook-meets-iTunes service, has once again underlined the somewhat novel idea that people want to chat and interact to a greater degree about the music they like. If it succeeds, it will be because people don’t just want access to music: they want to belong to a music community. 

In making predictions, it’s wise to look to the past. The tendency towards community isn’t surprising to anybody who has watched file-sharing evolve over the past decade. 

A (very) brief history of file-sharing 

The first wave of file-sharing, Napster, was a lonely affair: users searched and downloaded music through the central hub with as much social interaction as a simple Google search - i.e. none. You downloaded from a computer - whether there was a person in front of it was irrelevant. 

Click to read more ...

How Are We Gonna Pay These Musicians?

With the increasing ability for people to access, blog, manipulate, send and receive digital content such as music, many people have been trying to figure out how musicians can actually earn money in 2010. From the excellent work of The Cynical Musician it appears that the various new digital tools, while solving the artist’s problem of promotion and distribution, have not in fact leveled the playing field at all in terms of revenue. 

Conveniently enough, however, many countries are overhauling their copyright law to modernize and take into account these new technologies. I’ll explore here the idea that while these new tools are currently subject to the same power relationships as have always existed, there are options available to update the law in a way that could create a more fair system.

A case study

As a case study I’ll use three categories of songs of varying levels of commercial potential, with examples of each from the band Blur. Examples are from the 1990s, a “simpler time” when promotion and distribution was firmly out of the hands of artists themselves.

Click to read more ...