Week 2 – on Steve Gordon’s The Future of the Music Business, chapters 3 & 4 – 1/22/2011
Gordon does a great service for his readers in quickly differentiating ‘webcasting’ from ‘interactive streaming’ – necessarily so, for legal and financial reasons – as follows: webcasting is essentially radio delivered through the Web, (insofar as it is fixed content – whether music, talk, sports, etc.), whereas interactive streaming is content delivered through a similar method (streaming over the web) but with the listener driving the content in a dynamic way (to some extent), as a type of choose-your-own-adventure version of radio. Gordon spends no little amount of time focusing on the (successful) attempts by the large record companies, via the RIAA, to gain another revenue stream through payment for digital public performance of sound recordings, (payment of which is not required for terrestrial broadcast radio). According to Gordon (2008), the justification for the need for payment is the digital signal which can be easily copied and negatively impact sales of tangible recordings (records, CDs), (pp. 49-50). The same logic of product replacement via digital delivery is replicated in the DMCA when applied to satellite delivery, (as through Sirius or XM). Webcasting—at least according to The Future of the Music Business (and all of the legal wrangling it references)—is the focus of a continuing battle over rates that webcasters must pay, presumably because of the strong desire for labels to compensate for what they claim is a loss in revenue. The following chapter (chapter 4) on interactive streaming and downloading indicates that songwriters, via ASCAP and BMI, are as guilty of the same revenue-seeking behavior as record labels; in this case, representatives for songwriters argued that downloading should also be subject to public performance license, (Gordon, 2008, pp. 68-69). As Gordon goes to great lengths to emphasize, both fees and legislation are still very much up in the air.
References
Gordon, S. (2008). The future of the music business: How to succeed with the new digital technologies (2nd ed.). New York: Hal Leonard.
Week 2 – on Music Information Retrieval
The idea of ‘music information retrieval’ seems as nebulous and ambitious as ‘information architecture’ – nebulous in its overlap with other areas, (traditional librarianship, law, database management, for a start), and ambitious because of exactly this overlap as well as the sense of inclusion based on ‘music’ (whether as an abstraction, a recorded or written artifact, or a subject of classification and storage). Identifying the universe of what could be included within ‘music information retrieval’ is practically useful, as it aids in building a toolkit to manage music as a specialized sort of information source. In addition to knowledge of advancing technology that more readily allows for (technically) easy storage and access of musical recordings, an understanding of the web of stakeholders and the associated legal battles related to access and ownership are essential for any professional working within the field.
Week 2 – on various websites
International Association of Music Libraries, http://www.iaml.info
While in many ways, the IAML seem a typical association, (replicating much of the language common to the ALA, for instance), one particularly interesting expressed purpose stood out – supporting not only standard library practices, but also supporting work that may be slightly outside the scope of the contemporary library, such as creating music bibliographies or music documentation, (http://www.iaml.info/organization/what_is_iaml/principal_aims).
International Computer Music Association, http://www.computermusic.org/
The ICMA seems to have value outside of the world of traditional librarianship, particularly to the identified target population of those “involved in the technical, creative, and performance aspects of computer music,” (http://www.computermusic.org/page/3/). This is most clearly expressed in the practical approach, as in the list of software for use in creation and editing of computer music, (http://www.computermusic.org/page/35/subcat=2). There is also a space—and implied need through recognition—for research in the field, which the association seems to support through their conference as well as through linked publications. Still, the ICMA seems to emphasize practice first.
Musipedia.org, http://www.musipedia.org/
As the ‘About’ and main page both indicate, Musipedia looks to be trying to fill a niche that is not clearly defined – the page includes a search engine for tunes that uses melody input by means of a few impressive little technologies, (which works much better than I expected for classical compositions!). One worry, though, is the complexity of the search options considering functionally similar apps for mobile devices; it seems likely that this site will be rapidly outmoded, if it hasn’t been already.