Music and the Internet

 Our property project focused around music as property and how the Internet creates a conceptual vacuum around it.  We decided to focus our research on comparing the public’s opinion to musicians’ opinions on music as property to better understand the overall climate.  By the end of the term, we planned to develop the public and musicians’ opinions on music as property on the Internet.  To do this, we decided to create a public survey and interview musicians we knew personally on their opinion on the topic and post the responses on a blog.  One of the blockages we faced was the unexpectedness of the artist’s replies.  We ended up having to email many more artists than we planned to receive a good amount of interviews.  It was also challenging to get people to do our survey.  To solve this, we posted the survey to our private Facebooks to help get more replies.

   The results of our public survey are shown in the pie charts on our blog.  These results show that people most often either use file-sharing websites moderately often or not at all, both having 22.5%, but overall the results were very split.  90% of people said they knew the difference between illegal downloading and free music. As for how people get their music: again there was a pretty even split, but the majority said they use itunes and other music providers the most, at 29.8%.  The vast majority, at 96%, believe the Internet has changed they way they get music.  As for the question: do you think downloading music illegally is wrong?  70% said no, thirty yes.  Lastly, 51% of people say they aren’t more inclined to support an artist just because they give their music out for free.

   As for the artist interviews, most artists agreed that it was easier to get their music out there because of the Internet.  One artist, Brandon from the band Amarionette said “We are able to reach well over a thousand people at the click of a mouse, and that's a powerful tool considering all the outlets that are available for promotion online.”  Surprisingly most artists believed that illegal downloading is inevitable and have begun to adapt, even to the point of supporting it because of its power to spread music.  Artist Jeff Tedtaotao said: “If someone has your stuff on these sharing sites, that means you're probably doing something right. Someone's paying attention to you - music thrives off of attention” While they didn’t agree with the practice overall, they know it is going to happen, so they’ve decided to adapt.  

   Artists mostly believed that it is now easier to make it in music now than ten years ago.  Artist Patrick Manresa said: “I think artists nowadays are expected to do more. However, the internet has exploded making it easier to reach a larger audience.”  The artist agreed that with the Internet, there is more competition.  The last question we asked artists, was what they thought the effect of the Internet was on the music industry.  The artists all had different and mostly positive answers and also mentioned they fact that it made performance more important to artists who wanted to make a living off of music.

   We may not have completely solved the problems of music as property with our research, but we definitely gained a lot interesting insight into how artist and the public are adapting to the changes the Internet brings to music.  We’ve learned that, while music is always changing and developing, it has become less of a rivalrous good than it was before the Internet.  Artists now have to focus on live performance for revenue and have begun using what seems like detrimental processes, file-sharing, to their advantage.  Philosophically, the Internet has developed a new way of categorizing music.  Because it’s become this intangible object, artists, record companies, and the public alike have to adapt.  To adapt to this change,  everyone now views music itself not as property but as a form advertising and the real focus of the music industry has shifted to performance.