The digital landscape is changing. It appears evident that the web is and will continue to shape business forever, music is no different. The notion of creating a multimedia piece online seems pretty quick and convenient with the uprise of websites like Youtube, which makes publishing any multimedia content that you create as easy as sending an email to a friend. One of the major problems that the world of digital creativity faces is the issue of music licensing. If you want to use/share someone else's music, you have to take extreme precautions in order to perform this legally. On Thursday someone in class asked about the issue of downloading free music in relation to our discussion about free open source software, and after surfing the web looking for information on downloading music I came across a website called Opsound. Opsound is "a gift economy in action, an experiment in applying the model of free software to music". Musicians and sound artists are invited to add their work to the Opsound pool using a copyleft liscence developed by Creative Commons. The listeners are invited to download, share, remix, and reimagine. After browsing this website I started thinking about how successful this website could be if more people knew about the opportunities it has to offer. Say more and more artist in the music industry decided to release certain songs from there albums and download them to websites like Opsound, this would prevent people from downloading songs illegally from the web. The incentive for artists to download music to sites that use the free open source software model is that maybe they can agree to put a few songs of their choice on the website, and then place a link to a website where listeners can go if they would like to purchase more music from that particular artist. This method allows for the creators and/or producers of the product (in this case music) as well as the general public benefiting from new product put out on the web. I think this website can really tie into our discussion of the economic and emotional arguments on the topic of free open source software.
Brittni,
ReplyDeleteOpsound sounds like a really interesting website! I think if more artist knew about it they would use it all the time. It is not fair that artist spend so much time/money putting together songs and albums and then people just download their music for free. If i was in the music industry I would find that very frustrating and annoying, it seems like they are not being rewarded for all their hardwork.
-Liz
I totally agree that Opsound sounds like a really good idea for a music industry that is suffering from the effects of free file sharing. I will say, though that I think that free music downloads are offering smaller artists a lot of exposure that they may not have had before music downloading really took off. Artists not always being appropriately rewarded for their work is just a part of the digital revolution that the industry will have to deal with.
ReplyDeleteOpsound sounds really cool because it allows artists to make the choice to invite people to take the collaborative approach to music. This is one of the positives of the internet. It allows multiple people to connect, share, and create. I feel that it is unfair to download music illegally, because these artists deserve to make money for their creations, as long as the artist actually chooses to post their music on Opsound I think it can be a great tool for collaboration and a good tool for spreading ones sound.
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