I spent this morning watching
RiP: A Remix Manifesto for the 3rd time. Each time I watch it different points stick with me. The first time, the most interesting point i took from it was about the beginnings of Disney cartoons and how all of the stories from Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia and most notably Steamboat Willie, were simply reworkings of old stories from the public domain. Disney would years later be a leader in the change of copyright law to make sure their characters and stories would never enter public domain for others to use.
This time watching the film, i was struck more by the industry's way of using the "Artist" as the excuse for cracking down so hard on music piracy. None of the money from lawsuits against music pirates even goes towards the artist, the publishing company or record label takes 100%.
1. Culture always builds on the past.
The first point of the Remix Manifesto put together by Lawrence Lessig. Artists are constantly influenced by what came before them. Could we have jumped at some point from Mozart to Dr Dre without hundreds of years of slow innovation and inspiration through generations of musicians and leaps in technology? Once upon a time, musicians could only be influenced by the music which they heard being played in the same room as them, or being sung nearby. There was no such thing as recorded music. Until the phonograph or players pianos, there was no way of hearing ANYTHING without someone physically playing it for you. All acoustic, in front of you. Strings plucked, skins hit, wind blown somewhere near you. From the invention of recordings, people suddenly were able to bring music home from different places in the world, see what others are doing, listen to it over and over, learn it and then build upon it. From the Phonograph, to the cassette, to the CD, to the MP3 it has become easier and easier to access music, see what others have done, learn it and build upon it. And look at the results we have! The variety we have right now in 2010 is incredible. It seems that NOTHING we can possibly hear anymore can shock us. Nothing will seem futuristic, all options seem to have been covered (seem being the operative word, i'm sure every generation has said similar things, but we MEAN it!). There is a market for anything. The
fastest, the
slowest, anything goes.
This progression has come from the sheer amount of material available to us. Right now is a time when every person carries in their pocket an amount of music which up til just over a decade ago was reserved for only collectors. Technology has made it possible for any one person to listen to anything they can possibly imagine in a matter of minutes. This kind of availability broadens the influence of every musician by crazy amounts. Suddenly people can throw together infinite styles of music into one piece. Before the days of music downloading you would have to buy a CD, or have someone make you a mixtape, to hear these kinds of things.
The doc speaks a lot about remixing as an art form but remixing can really just be considered the overall term to cover music creation of kind, or media of any kind. All artistic creation is based on something from the past.
Of course the reason for all this is money. Big corporations need to stay rich. They speak of staff losses, huge revenue losses, bands losing money etc etc. Have we not proved yet, that you don't need $1 million to record a great song? Do people not have software on their computers which can be used to make music which rivals the sounds of professional studios? Record labels spend millions making an album, but why? I know it USED to cost a lot of money to make a great sounding album. Why do bands still get left with huge bills, left to tour and tour for years and for no money, just paying off their label debts. The Artists are the ones the labels are fighting FOR right? How many bands in Australia are making a living off their music? Not many thats for sure. Most that make a big album spend the next however many years paying back the label for the costs of the album.
The whole model of "record label pays for recording and promotion of an album, gets band shows etc" is something that most bands don't need anymore. They can most often pay for the recording themselves, pay for the mastering and pay for the printing themselves. So are labels only for promotion now? It going to be tough for bands from now on, but maybe its just time for a re-thinking of the way they all work.
