Music Online

The issue of the means through which it can be allowed for music online to exist, and the legality and commercial nature of these programs, has proven to be highly contentious in the era of the widespread availability of online services. The music industry has long based its business model on technology which was difficult or nearly impossible to reproduce effectively as a viable means for gaining music without much in the way of cost. As analogue methods for sounding recording have been edged out and supplanted by increasingly flexible and accessible digital technology, culminating in the current period in online music, the record industry has found itself less and less assured of its ability to control the dissemination of the music it finances and thus less capable of assuring a high profit margin for backers and investors. Though there is much music online and readily available in the contemporary digital landscape, it has not occurred with past and ongoing dissent on the part of the recording industry against the means for online music, which has taken a number of different forms, including various legal charges and suits, and has been accorded a mixed reception in terms of its ability to change the behavior of online music fans.

Some long time observers of copyright issues and record industry practices have charged that the strategies adopted by music label executives in regards to the availability of music online without charge have been overly punitive and rather than impressing upon music enthusiasts the ethical dimensions involved in making the decision to act in downloading online music without making any form of financial compensation to the record label or to the artist, the effect of the overall corporate legal strategy has been to exacerbate the issues posed to the record industry business model by the easy access to available music online and drive a wedge in the world of popular music between its business and fanbase ends, with the most negative consequences being felt by artists and bands who have an increasing difficulty in wresting a living from their work in the overall context of online music. A notable early instance of music being offered for free download without the consent of artists or record labels occurred in the case of the Internet service Napster.com, which became hugely popular among music consumer as a source for illegal but readily accessible music online before being confronted with crippling lawsuits, from which it emerged under the wing of the record industry but with a consequently diminished ability to appeal to music fans. A more popular source for online music can now be found in the form of the popular peer-to-peer websites, which offer access to music online through a far less centralized model than was employed by Napster in providing its services to music fans. Lower quality but less potentially risky forums for music downloads can be found on YouTube videos with audio enabled, which on occasion attract the opprobrium of labels and artists.

New and Current Music

In the digital age the means through which music fans and casual enthusiasts can be apprised of ongoing developments in the current music scene have greatly increased in availability and ease of use, with new artists and record labels ascending quickly into the forefront of new music in large part due to the quick methods of exposure they gain access to through popular online sites and services. Though major and long established music acts have frequently seemed confused about the requirements of navigating this very new and different media landscape of the post-analogue era, successful stars of current music have typically manifested a facility with and ability to take advantage of the new opportunities posed by digital means. Music fans who feel they are lagging behind in comfort level and knowledge of new music would do well to attend closely to some of the most avidly followed and respected institutions of the current music world and understand how they can use the various services and functions offered by these sites to their advantage in keeping up with their long established favorites as well as finding new enthusiasms to follow, while people hoping to make an impression as performers or behind-the-scenes professionals in the new music world would also do well to be apprised of the methods through digital news and gossip is spread and gathered.

The cornerstone of the current music scene of digitally driven marketing and distribution can today be considered to take the form of iTunes, which through its companion device the iPod helped to popularize the use of digital file formats, often at no point derived from a physical form such as a CD, as a widely available mode for listening to current music. iTunes offers the functions of allowing the purchase of a large degree of commercially available back catalogs and new music through its Internet-enabled function, while the iPod, though not unique as a small and portable device to listening to such music files, did attain a degree of commercial success which eluded other formats.

The state of music journalism, which for a long time had been dominated by the institution of Rolling Stone Magazine, with its roots in the countercultural rock scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s and its subsequent adoption of an establishment status in the music industry, has also been changed by new music developments, such as the widespread creation of online sites which post mp3s, articles and reviews of older and current music. Though many are fairly limited in scope and commercial viability and can at most be considered amateur projects, a site which might be considered the Rolling Stone of the current music scene exists in the form of the site Pitchfork, which offers extensive coverage of new music and thus far in the time that it has existed has played an important role in creating the foundations for the popular success of new artists and bands, in the process earning a wide degree of visibility in the music industry.

Musical Notes

Though the notion of music notes may seem like an integral, necessary part of any system for creating and performing music, it is less intuitive than the casual, non musically inclined listener might suppose, being more a part of the history of how the modern world has quantified and systematized various aspects of native human culture than an implied part of the basic existence of music. The method through which musical notes are arrived at, represented and accessed by musicians can vary widely between different regions, and the way in which they came to take their present-day form is one that took a considerable portion of time to unfold. A survey of the development of human artistic and intellectual culture throughout history will necessarily include some coverage of the ways in which music notes have been created as ideal systems and as part of the practical process of playing music.

The earliest forms of musical notes have been considered by musical history scholars to exist in the form of a cuneiform tablet found by an archeological team in Iraq that is felt to date from 2000 B.C.E. It is far more rudimentary and less indicative of degrees of sophistication than today’s systems for representing music notes but nonetheless holds considerable historical significance for its place in time, as does a more sophisticated system found recorded on tablets that are estimated by archeological experts to date from about 1250 B.C.E., which contain the earliest known melodies that have found to be recorded. Much later in history, during the era of the ancient Greeks, a system of musical notes was in place that has been found by contemporary musical scholars to be enabled for the representation of pitch and note duration, and to a lesser degree harmony. Despite its limitations for the representation of music notes in comparison to modern systems of musical notes, this system had much staying power and remained in place in some form in Greek culture until the fourth century C.E., around the time that the Roman Empire, which had dominated Greece for much of that time, was falling into a steady decline.

The next great source of creativity in the task of formulating systems of notations for creating understandable charts of music notes can be found in the Arab World toward the end of the first millennium C.E., when that culture was in a position of great political power that was matched by its intellectual vitality. One of the most important figures in the Arab World’s movement toward an organized system of musical notes was the intellectual Al-Kindi, who moved practice beyond the Greek system in its expressive powers and complexity of organization, while his successor in that task Al-Farabi devised a “pure tone” system that is still widely relied upon as a source of music notes in the Arab World’s music. The next great source for innovation in the creation of systems of notation for making and interpreting musical notes came from the medieval European monasteries.

Free Music Downloads

Like most of the other segments of the commercial media landscape, the record industry based its financial model for most of the 20th century on the hierarchical nature of its system for allowing access to products. Vinyl-based technology, in particular, facilitated the ability of the record industry to restrict its products from being freely reproduced and disseminated by people other than themselves. Free music has increasingly become the bane of the pop music industry, however, with the shift to distribution formats more easily reproduced by even casual fans, along with the development of online information pipelines that can enable free music downloads to be enacted easily through Internet browsers and personal computers. While in the past the primary means for gaining exposure to the moment’s most popular music consisted of radio broadcasts and paying for copies of recording in local record shops, the modern information landscape favors those who have no legal or ethical qualms regarding free music. Though relatively harsh penalties have been enacted against some of the individuals and organizations involved in making free music downloads available, it is still a fairly safe field for people who are aware of the potential dangers posed by both the legal watchdogs of the record industry dedicated to preventing the dissemination of free music and the malicious programs which may be released onto your computer by trusting in the reliability of the person supplying free music downloads to you. Though the moral questions involved in this issue will have to be decided by the individual music consumer, every Internet user should be aware of the variety in which free music can exist on the Internet and the differences in degrees of safety and effectiveness that different delivery systems can be relied up to provide.

One of the earliest and most prominent sources for free music downloads existed in the form of the online service Napster.com, which provided access to a wide range of free music. It thus attracted large degrees of public and media attention in regard to the threat it was felt to pose to the profitability of the record industry as a going concern in business. A lengthy and complex court battle tied up the website and eventually resulted in it taking a new form that had the approval of the record industry but was distrusted by music fans as a source for free music downloads. The next form taken by the availability of free music on the Internet was that of the commonly used distribution system of peer to peer websites, combined with the services of such functions as bittorrent trackers, which decentralized the delivery system for free music and thus made the record industry’s task of policing and preventing it much more difficult. As to a platform for free music downloads that is, if not completely compatible with the wishes of the music industry and allowed under the law, many mp3 blogs exist that generally offer only one or several sample tracks from an album.

Types of Music

Though in a certain sense music might be thought of as one of the purely entertainment-providing forms of art, essentially direct and sensory in its appeal to listeners, as opposed to an artwork with essential visual or narrative elements, the way in which music is understood and quantified by formal systems of academic analysis and the informal habits of fans is far from being unselfconscious or completely intuitive. Sorting and understanding the different types of music that are in existence is a task that is heavily conditioned by both currents of thought in existence in intellectual culture and social practices and rituals governing the circumstances under which music is made into something of use by its listeners. Music scholars who have departed from the strictly technical means through compositions are created and performed have often looked at the ways in which types of music are created, not only for the purpose of providing classifications for newly formed genres, but also for inquiring into the basis for recognizing differences between types of music and drawing value judgments from such observations. One such important distinction often made by both serious scholars and casual enthusiasts in that made between types of music consists of the supposed difference in existence between serious and popular music.
Though this boundary has long existed for the purpose of differentiating between types of music, it is often applied in different ways and to different fields of music, so that one genre considered to be popular and not worthy of receiving serious analysis during one era in musical thought made by another have come to assumed preeminence in intangible standards of “respectability” and prestige over another, more recently formed genre in music. For instance, jazz music at the start of the 20th century was considered a strictly popular genre, intended primarily for entertainment and for holding dances between people of low social status. Later in the century, however, jazz had been accorded great respect among the different types of music, in comparison to which enthusiasts for jazz music often considered records released in the rock & roll genres to be “merely” commercial, jazz in the interim have moved upward in critical respectability and downward in commercial value. As rock music became more important in the cultural experience of younger generations, for whom it moved away from the strictly social function of functioning as a sonic backdrop to dances and became a genre noted in its own worth for containing worthwhile means for expression, a distinction was created in the rock world between records that were considered to attain the condition of seriousness and those that remained entirely in the realm of popular culture. An ongoing phenomenon in the culture surrounding the production and reception of music in the contemporary world is that of the increasing proliferation in types of music that are identified as existing by serious and casual observers, with the partisans of such fields finding qualities of seriousness that others may be less capable of picking up on.

Music on Youtube

The issue of music on youtube that can thus be easily accessed with access to a basic Internet browser has exercised the music industry and its artists as a major threat to their ability to control and profit from the dissemination of their songs. In return, advocates for the broad body of legal doctrines governing copyright enforcement referred to as “fair use” have claimed that record industry legal measures are unnecessarily and indiscriminately punitive, engineered less to protect the fortunes and artistic pursuits of musicians than to drive a wedge in popular music between its professional base and its constituency of fans. In reference to the issue of youtube music, much attention was brought to it by the legal case of Lenz v.

Universal Music Corp., which also brought for one of the first time a considered legal decision to bear on the issues raised in connection to music on youtube. This case ended with the decision in reference to the posting of music on youtube that fair use doctrines should be taken into consideration by copyright holders before the issuing of injunctions in reference to youtube music.

The causes for this suit originally arose in reference to one Stephanie Lenz, a California resident. In February 2007 Lenz posted a video on YouTube of her children dancing to Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy.” The video lasted twenty-nine seconds and contained about twenty seconds of the song, with only poor audio quality. In June of that year, the song’s copyright holder, Universal Music Corp. issued a takedown notice related to this occurrence of youtube music instructing YouTube to remove Stephanie Lenz’s video from its online archive of files. Later that month Lenz responded with a counter-notification to YouTube that claimed the applicability of fair use doctrines in regard to copyrighted materials in this instance of music on youtube and requested that the video be placed on the site again, which in six weeks YouTube had complied with. In July 2007 Lenz filed suit against Universal Music Corp. in regards to misrepresentation, seeking to elicit from the court a declaration that her act of posting music on youtube without either hopes of monetary profit to herself or conceivable financial damage to the copyright holder had not infringed on any laws against youtube music.

Further statements as regarding this issue of youtube music behavior were issued by Prince in September of that year, declaring his intention to “reclaim his art on the internet,” and Universal Music Corp. in an October 2007 statement to the effect that they intended to remove all material derived from artwork originally copyrighted by Prince that had been posted on the Internet, whether in the form of music on youtube or otherwise. In making her case, Lenz argued that the artist and the record company were acting in bad faith by taking a blanket approach to any kind of material connected to Prince, rather than considering context and intention, which convinced the District Court of Northern California.

Music Cds

In the history of the modern popular music industry, a recurrent phenomenon has appeared in the form of the business’s need to adapt to new delivery mechanisms for the distribution of albums and songs to consumers, which later is occasioned by some measure of resistance and reluctance on the part of the industry’s business leaders. Over the course of the 20th century recording industry, new innovations were introduced for distributing music in physical form, each of which seemed to threaten current industry practices by changing the means through which consumers could access music. One particularly major innovation came in the form of compact discs, or cds, which introduced the seeds of long-term change in the form of utilization of digital technology. Consumers who purchased music cds could conceivably make a relatively high-quality copy of the music contained therein and then easily pass the new music cds to other would-be paying customers. Another complaint that arose on the part of consumers, though this criticism more gradually and with more of an aesthetic than a practical basis, as to the small size of cds, which at first had increased their usability by ensuring that music cds were easily transported and stored in comparison to larger formats like vinyl LPs, but also fostered the suspicion that the high prices charged for rather unremarkable-appearing devices were inflated more for the music industry’s convenience than by necessity of the production techniques involved. When relatively high-speed internet became widely available, to some extent the bottom dropped out of the market for music cds, which had been superseded by the digital file formats they initially helped introduce. Illegal downloads of popular music originally released on cds have become widespread through peer to peer sharing websites, as have legitimate music downloads enabled through online formats such as iTunes.

In a move that has been taken as an early sign of what measures the beleaguered music industry might take to adjust its business model to the exigencies of the online age, the world’s largest music company, the Universal Music Group, has announced that as a matter of policy it will be undertaking an experiment in lowering the prices asked for cds. In the press release, reported through Billboard Magazine, Universal Music spread the news that it would be lowering the price of cds released onto the market to $10 or lower. The change will not take effect immediately and is being referred to by Universal Music Group as only a “pricing test,” which will not apply across the board to purchases, but will be limited in its applicability to newly released music cds and then only to those released in the U.S. For all of these provisions, the move is still being looked to by the company and by the executives of other music industry labels as a possible stop-gap measure to fulfill the dual functions of helping to return older fans and introduce younger fans to the habit of looking to cds as a source for music.

Sheet Music

Though popular music has always been a component of human culture, the rise of a commercial, large-scale and hugely profitable industry that specializes in bringing songs to a general public is a relatively recent development tied to such trends as the development of commercially available recording technology. Before that was achieved, however, the essential key to the music industry’s creation lay in the rise of literacy and availability of leisure time to the bourgeois middle class of the 19th century, which passed its time partly through the means of commercially available sheet music by which songs could be codified, rather than being gradually disseminated through oral folk culture in varying forms, soon after they were composed. Music sheets became particularly attractive for ownership after the rise of the piano as an essential feature of middle-class life, commonly displayed during social visits and parties as a way of indicating social status. The beginnings of a true industry based on the distribution of sheet music began in the United States in the late 19th century, in a business centered on New York City that came to be known as Tin Pan Alley.

The early ability of artists and business people to offer music sheets on a commercially viable basis was held down by the weak copyright protections in place, which did little to prevent sheet music once released onto the market from being reproduced without consequence. Toward the end of the century, stronger protections for copyrights enabled music sheets to be looked to by musical professionals as a means for a living. Though companies involved in publishing sheet music sprang up throughout the country in various regional centers, the largest companies were set up in New York City, which came to be regarded as the center of the industry. The area in which these companies were located, and then the industry as a whole, came to be known as Tin Pan Alley, a place originally identified as being located on West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, with the term later being applied to the neighborhoods known for sheet music publishers and musical instrument vendors in other cities and countries, as for instance on England’s Denmark Street. It is generally believed to refer to the cacophony of many different pianos being played at once, but the actual derivation has not been satisfactorily established by music industry historians.
The use of music sheets began to fade in the early 20th century, as first the phonograph and later the developments in radio technology established recordings as the main means by which people gained access to popular music. The record industry thus supplanted firms based on publishing music sheets for popular songs as the primary mover in the popular music industry. Tin Pan Alley continued as a major force in American popular music after this change in delivery mechanisms for song compositions, continuing in some form or another until the rock & roll explosion beginning in the 1950s and achieved in the 1960s reoriented popular music.

Music Videos

Music videos have been a widely used component of the record industry since the 1980s and the creation of MTV, which afforded for the first time a ready-to-use delivery system for the films that bands and artists might create to promote their work. Since then a well-executed or memorably conceived music video has been shown to have the ability to propel the conversation around a song or an artist and to make a permanent impact on the pop cultural landscape. Though music videos are most associated with the record industry of the last several decades, they have precursors in earlier eras of popular music, as some form of the music video has been around for a long time, albeit often in more marginal and technically clunky forms than are widely available today.

Pop culture historians date the first instance of something resembling the modern music video at least in its basic conception and approach to a date as far back as 1894, at a time when the main means for dissemination of popular music was not through recording technology but rather through the sale of sheet music enabling people to sing the songs themselves. For the promotion of the song “The Little Lost Child,” the music company sponsored live performances of the song that were accompanied by a series of still images shown on a projector. Several decades later, the motion picture industry prompted the creation of some of the first films that could be said to truly constitute music videos, as the ability to synch films to soundtracks became practicable on a wide scale. Warner Brothers made a series of musical short films, known under the title Vitaphone, which featured animations along with song performances. The cartoons created during this period also tended to anticipate the future use of the music video as a promotional tool, often featuring songs that were being promoted by the film studio, sometimes in live action interludes. Music historians have, however, pinpointed the real start of modern music videos in the short films made by the music star Louis Jordan during the subsequent decade.

Coming nearer to the present, the late 1950s and early 1960s saw the rise of the most prominent ancestor of the contemporary music video, as first developed in France, in the form of the “visual jukebox,” the Scopitone, which featured alongside the usual accouterments of the jukebox a viewing screen allowing the exhibition of a 16 mm film synced up with a magnetic soundtrack. Some of the prominent music stars featured in Scopitones include Serge Gainsbourg and Johnny Hallyday. These early music videos then spread to West Germany, and from there to English bars. By 1964, 500 Scopitones existed in the U.S. In this era, artists like Procol Harum, Nancy Sinatra, and Dionne Warwick appeared in Scopitone films. Though Scopitones faded in popularity, the late 1960s explosion in rock music saw many artists producing clips for themselves akin to music videos, which eventually received regular showings through precursors to MTV.