Our property project focused around music as property and the conceptual
vacuum surrounding it that the Internet creates. We decided to focus our research on comparing
the public’s opinion compared to musicians’ opinions on music as property to
better understand the overall climate. By the end of the term, we
planned to develop the public and musicians’ opinions on music as property on
the Internet. To do this, we decided to
create a public survey and interview musicians we knew personally on their
opinion on the topic and post the responses on a blog. One of the blockages we faced was the
unexpectedness of the artist’s replies.
We ended up having to email many more artists than we planned to receive
a good amount of interviews. It was also
challenging to get people to do our survey.
To solve this, we posted the survey to our private Facebooks to help get
more replies.
The
results of our public survey are shown in the pie charts on our blog. These results show that people most often either
use file-sharing websites moderately often or not at all, both having 22.5%,
but overall the results were very split.
90% of people said they knew the difference between illegal downloading
and free music. As for how people get their music:
again there was a pretty even split, but the majority said they use itunes and
other music providers the most, at 29.8%.
The vast majority, at 96%, believe the Internet has changed they way
they get music. As for the question: do
you think downloading music illegally is wrong?
70% said no, thirty yes. Lastly,
51% of people say they aren’t more inclined to support an artist just because
they give their music out for free.
As for the artist interviews, most
artists agreed that it was easier to get their music out there because of the
Internet. One artist, Brandon from the
band Amarionette said “We are able to reach well over a thousand people at the
click of a mouse, and that's a powerful tool considering all the outlets that
are available for promotion online.” Surprisingly most artists believed
that illegal downloading is inevitable and have begun to adapt, even to the
point of supporting it because of its power to spread music. Artist Jeff Tedtaotao said: “If someone has
your stuff on these sharing sites, that means you're probably doing something
right. Someone's paying attention to you - music thrives off of attention”
While they didn’t agree with the practice overall, they know it is going to
happen, so they’ve decided to adapt.
Artists mostly believed that it is
now easier to make it in music now than ten years ago. Artist Patrick Manresa said: “I think artists
nowadays are expected to do more. However, the internet has exploded making it
easier to reach a larger audience.” The
artist agreed that with the Internet, there is more competition. The last question we asked artists,
was what they thought the effect of the Internet was on the music
industry. The artists all had different
and mostly positive answers and also mentioned they fact that it made
performance more important to artists who wanted to make a living off of music.
We may not have completely solved the
problems of music as property with our research, but we definitely gained a lot
interesting insight into how artist and the public are adapting to the changes
the Internet brings to music. We’ve
learned that, while music is always changing and developing, it has become less
of a rivalrous good than it was before the Internet. Artists now have to focus on live performance
for revenue and have begun using what seems like detrimental processes,
file-sharing, to their advantage.
Philosophically, the Internet has developed a new way of categorizing
music. Because it’s become this intangible
object, artists, record companies, and the public alike have to adapt. To adapt to this change, everyone now views music itself not as
property but as a form advertising and the real focus of the music industry has
shifted to performance.
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