GROUP PROJECT – WEBSITE

GROUP MEMBERS – CHRIS BARGY, COLLEEN KOTTENBACH

https://sites.google.com/site/musiclibraryproposal/

Research Journal Blog Post 1

I really liked the discussions on copyrights in different industries. It is a huge deal in the television and music realms. It is a huge part of my life being in the music industry. It’s all about royalties these days! I am an electronic music producer and DJ and musician. I use samples everyday. A lot of the samples I create myself but many samples come from stuff others have played or created. Now I could take those samples and chop them up and put effects and filters on them and they would sound nothing like the original. Now is that mine? Do I owe the person who made the original money? Are musicians committing musical plagiarism? You can only play a grouping and patterns of notes so many ways. I would like to do research on musical copyrights. I feel there is a lot more to it these days because we are so digital.

Subject Headings:

M – Music

K1411-1485 – Copyright

Digital Preservation

I think digital preservation is a great thing. We all wreak the benefits of it everyday.  There are huge computer servers in countries around the world dedicated to capturing and collecting all sorts of information.  Most of the music servers are located in Europe.  We might as well utilize the relationship we have with technology these days. Almost everyone has some sort of an external hard drive to store data on.  There is a website online called The Internet Archive which catalogs texts, audio, software, web sites, moving images, etc. I like this site because it archives live concerts. They are all audience recordings, which can be nice sometimes. No soundboard or “SBD” copies can be put on the archive without the bands consent. Some bands sell their live recordings, so they do not allow it being in free trade.  We used to trade concert recordings through the mail. There were databases were people would list their collections. You could then email that person and set up a trade. You would send the blank discs to them and they will burn them and send them back. You would pay for postage and that was it.  Having servers dedicated to this helps us.

http://www.archive.org/

Class notes 9/21/10

We began today’s class by finishing our discussion of the changes in music production and distribution from last time. Here’s the text from the slide I showed with short summaries of each of the 3 articles we read on this topic — each author’s name links to the article. Remember that your blog posts should include a short summary of the reading you choose to write about.

Article Summaries

• In this article Malitz reviews the Radiohead album “In Rainbows,” which was initially available only from their website as a free download.

• Elton, a former music industry executive, discusses the many services that major record labels offer to support their musical artists.

• Jones explores the growth in popularity of music groups on independent record labels, using the Arcade Fire album “The Suburbs” as an example.

For the rest of the class we discussed Web 2.0. Below are the words we wrote on the board when discussing the 2 articles we read (click to see a larger version of the image):

And here’s the text from the other slides we viewed during our discussion:

1. Conversion to digital (both text and non-text media) –> ability to INTERACT with these media

2. Issues w/participatory media?
• Quality
• Expertise
• Economics
• Organization (findability)

Class notes 9/16/10

In today’s class we discussed non-text media: images, audio (including music), video (including TV and movies) and multimedia.

The websites we discussed are below, and I also snapped a picture of the whiteboard with our discussion question and some of the ideas you shared during discussion (click to see a larger version of the image):

• Visual imagery has also moved from print to digital, and many museums feature images from their collections on their websites, like the Brooklyn Museum (click the Collections link). Also note that the museum has a blog on which it publishes news + interacts with the community, and uploads images to Flickr as well.

• Photo sharing websites like Flickr are another way that images can be distributed digitally. Flickr is also an example of user-generated content — photos are uploaded by users and tagged with keywords to facilitate searching.

• Many radio stations now broadcast via the internet as well as over the airwaves, like WFMU, a radio station in New Jersey.

• Apple’s iTunes service is one of the major distributors of digital audio and video content (including music and podcasts).

• Major label, smaller label and independent (unsigned) musicians in all genres have embraced MySpace as a way to distribute their music and gain new fans. (And, of course, MySpace is a social networking website, too.)

• Course lectures and other academic podcasts (audio and video) are also increasingly available online. Academic Earth is website that aggregates content from universities and colleges; iTunes U provides a similar service.

• Of course, YouTube is one of the most popular ways that digital video can be distributed. It features everything from home videos to academic lectures to music videos and more.

• The Please Rob Me project aggregated data from Twitter and foursquare (a location-aware web service) and presented it as an ever-expanding list of home burglary opportunities. It’s a pretty clever comment on some of the privacy issues that can arise from using these media in new ways.

What do record labels do now?

The music business and the record label is an ever-growing business that will continue to excel in the economy.  One successful band named Arcade fire has been working with a record company called Merge Records which is an independent label from North Carolina. This record company was started from musicians Mac McCaughan and Laura Balance, in the year 1989.  Arcade Fire’s previous two albums have skyrocketed  or almost skyrocketed and in their third album “The Suburbs” is expected to amount to  the same or even better level.

This article discusses a lot about about the music and recording business which I know nothing about. I did learn about that the difference between a major and indie labels is that now it has less to do with aesthetics than with the way the bands may conceive of their careers. However, as technology is advancing many music and songs are available on websites for download and Itunes.  As the number of people download music through the internet and Itunes, the number of record labels and albums decrease. The decrease will greatly affect the economy as well as major record labels.

– Jessica Deng