Going means trouble and staying makes it double: the value of licensing recorded music online

This paper discusses whether a copyright compensation system (CCS) for recorded music—endowing private Internet subscribers with the right to download and use works in return for a fee—would be welfare increasing. It reports on the results of a discrete choice experiment conducted with a representative sample of the Dutch population consisting of 4986 participants. Under some conservative assumptions, we find that applied only to recorded music, a mandatory CCS could increase the welfare of rights holders and users in the Netherlands by over €600 million per year (over €35 per capita). This far exceeds current rights holder revenues from the market of recorded music of ca. €144 million per year. A monthly CCS fee of ca. €1.74 as a surcharge on Dutch Internet subscriptions would raise the same amount of revenues to rights holders as the current market for recorded music. With a voluntary CCS, the estimated welfare gains to users and rights holders are even greater for CCS fees below €20 on the user side. A voluntary CCS would also perform better in the long run, as it could retain a greater extent of market coordination. The results of our choice experiment indicate that a well-designed CCS for recorded music would simultaneously make users and rights holders better off. This result holds even if we correct for frequently observed rates of overestimation in contingent valuation studies

Copying, copyright and originality; imitation, transformation and popular musicians

With copyright becoming ever more important for business and government, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the practices and values associated with copying in popular music culture and advocates a more critical approach to notions of originality. Drawing from interviews with working musicians this article challenges the approaches to copying and popular music that pitch corporate notions of piracy against creative sharing by citizens. It explores differing approaches to the circulation of recordings and identifies three distinct types of creative copying: i) learning through imitation, ii) copying as transformation, iii) copying for commercial opportunity. The article then considers how copying is caught between a commercial necessity for familiar musical products that must conform to existing expectations and a copyright legislative rationale requiring original sounds with individual owners. The article highlights how legacies from a long history of human copying as a means of acquiring knowledge and skills leads to a collision of creative musical practices, commercial imperatives and copyright regulation and results in a series of unavoidable tensions around originality and copying that are a central characteristic of cultural production

Making live music count:The UK live music census

In 2017 we conducted the first-ever nationwide live music census, allowing for unprecedented levels of detailed, comparable data on the live music cultures of different localities. Live music censuses have been increasingly used in recent years (e.g. Melbourne, Edinburgh, Bristol) to illustrate the value of music to policymakers. This has coincided with challenging times for urban live music venues, particularly small venues and clubs. We present key census findings here, reflecting on how local contexts both shape the census process and may be informed by it, and on the growth of the idea of “Music Cities” to inform policy

The hegemonic copyright-regime vs. the sharing copyright users of music?

In this commentary the increasing discrepancy between the emerging participatory networked culture and the hegemonic copyright and intellectual property regime is contextualised and subsequently problematised. While this is a feature and growing conflict for every form of authored work – news, films, books, academic work, photography, the focus here is on music and more in particular on the sharing of music. Sharing music is not a new phenomenon, but current copyright users share music with weak peers in addition to strong peers which has taken sharing to a whole different level reminiscent of a gift-culture, but with less need for reciprocity. Music audiences attribute less value to a digital product than to an artefact such as a CD or vinyl record. The reaction of the music industry to these phenomena has been hostile up until now, criminalising the copyright user and lobbying for the close monitoring of the online behaviour of all internet users. However, while the industry foregrounds its potential losses based on the number of downloads, as well as the difficulties this provokes for young beginning artists, others are pointing towards the societal benefits of worldwide free access to such a wide variety of music. Furthermore, several counter-voices in the copyright debate have emerged, from copyleft to copyriot and more and more artists mainstream and alternative are engaging fully with the participatory culture. In this commentary an argument is developed in favour of the music industry embracing this participatory networked culture rather than take us back to the future of 1984. Democracy and civic liberties are more important than the corporate interests of a few

Disruptive sharing in a digital age: rejecting neoliberalism?

Some argue that neoliberalism can be seen as having negated its negation, namely socialism and communism, and become unquestionable and common sense. However, many practices from below resist, reject or at least disrupt the stringent property rights regime and the primacy of the market, two core elements of neoliberal ideology. Some of these practices of resistance are in the form of a disruption to or rejection of the commodity exchange model. In this article we address three modes of sharing in a digital context, embedded in a cultural exchange model - sharing code, sharing content and sharing access. These different practices of giving and sharing are analysed according to the way in which reciprocity is articulated, the extent to which they disrupt the capitalist model of commodity exchange, and the ways in which they interact or not with it. We conclude that all forms of digital sharing involve degrees of reciprocity, and that all sharing in digital contexts is gradually appropriated by capitalist logics, mainly through the creation of auxiliary revenues. Many sharing practices do not intend to reject or disrupt, so, while some sharing practices might constitute a (partial) disruption to the commodity exchange model, they may not necessarily result in its negation. Recent attempts by states and parts of the entertainment industry to discipline or coerce the revivified participatory culture and its cultural exchange ethic to fit the commodity exchange model raise serious concerns

'It's all the same, only he's not here'?: popular music and political change in post-Tuđman Croatia

While Franjo Tuđman was the president of Croatia (1990–99), popular music and other forms of entertainment were heavily structured around the key presidential narratives: Croatia’s political and cultural independence from Yugoslavia, and the idea that Croatia’s war effort had been purely defensive. After Tuđman, the Croatian music industry had to cope with media pluralism and the transnational challenges of the digital era. Patriotic popular music expressed an oppositional narrative of Euroscepticism and resistance to the Hague Tribunal, yet Croatia retained and expanded its position in the transnational post-Yugoslav entertainment framework, undermining a key element of Tuđman’s ideology