Chapter Eleven - The Case of ccMixter: Credit-Giving within a Communal Online Remixing Practice

Summary

The opening decade of the new millennium, especially the later part, saw a surge of enthusiasm for new digital technologies and the ways in which these enable formerly passive consumers to activate themselves and engage creatively with the culture surrounding them. Music technologies played a substantial role in this phenomenon. Nowadays, any enthusiast can home-record. Sampling and manipulating pre-existing music have become much simpler. Likewise, the distribution of music is no longer difficult and expensive. It is easy and costs next to nothing. As a consequence of these developments, the question how pop music production works no longer has a self-evident answer. There is a widespread debate on the future of pop music culture, which focuses primarily on issues of copyright and intellectual property. Against this backdrop, my research on the online remix community ccMixter.org, seeks to offer a different approach by investigating remixing as a cultural practice and drawing upon the notion of analogies as a conceptual tool. First, however, I will describe in more detail the dominant views on the culture of recorded popular music.

Corporate views versus digital utopians

In schematic terms, the copyright debate is divided into two camps, the corporate music industry and the “digital utopians”, to use the term coined by Geoff Taylor, the chief executive of the British Phonographic Industry. The arguments advanced by the music corporations offer variations on a single theme. Let me cite a document from the 2005 Supreme Court case MGM Studios vs Grokster (a person-to-person software provider) as it perfectly summarizes the industry's argument in just a few lines:

If the work of creators is not protected, and is used around the world without just payment, it is very likely that, in the end, neither the creator nor the copyright holder will be able to continue to make this work available. The losers will not only be the artists whose talent and hard work is the creative heart on each screen, TV and Ipod; but also the very audience that enjoys quality movies, music and television.

Thus, the music industry casts itself in the role of the provider of an indispensable service. If this service is discontinued, artists, consumers and even music itself will suffer.