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

The dynamics of product differentiation in the British record industry

The paper conducts a statistical analysis of the dynamics of the sale of new music (product differentiation innovation) in the record industry. In pursuing this goal the paper generates new data and analyses a previously unutilized data set. The paper finds that there is a strong correlation between new music innovation in the audio singles and albums market. This is found to be mainly concurrent in the same quarter and to have a reasonably short product life. The paper discovers that these features also characterise the dynamics of record company performance. The research indicates that record companies are willing to sell singles at a loss due to advertising rather than learning externalities. At the industry level, the paper finds that new music innovation does not effect market size significantly and mainly causes ‘business stealing’ effects between record companies, with exceptional cases of multiplier effects. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1996music industry, product differentiation, econometric methodology, demand,

Online consumer misbehaviour: an application of neutralization theory

Studies have argued that misbehaviour by customers is becoming increasingly prevalent in certain sectors. However, online consumer misbehaviour is comparatively under-researched. The focus of the current study is peer-to-peer activities, including copying music, movies, software or video games: a phenomenon which affects the entertainment sector as a whole and costs the industry billions of pounds each year. Neutralization theory provides a potentially fruitful perspective from which to explore consumer justifications and rationalizations for their online misbehaviour. The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which peer-to-peer users employ techniques of neutralization to justify prior-to behaviour or rationalize their activities post behaviour. First, a review of online customer misbehaviour is provided, followed by an overview of existing research into the techniques of neutralization. Following a discussion of the research methods employed, findings regarding the peer-to-peer online misbehaviours and neutralization techniques are presented. Data analysis reveals that peer-to-peer file-sharers employ (often multiple) techniques of neutralization in order to pre-justify or post-event rationalize their activities, including: denial of victim; denial of injury; denial of responsibility; claim of normality; claim of relative acceptability; justification by comparison; and appeal to higher loyalties. The paper concludes with a series of implications for both theory and practice