So we all know by now that when it comes to music, as an art form and as entertainment, in the 21st century everything is open for game and that there are no teams, right? I mean with the billions of songs exchanged via illegal torrent pirating, the fallout of stores like Media Play, and the easy widespread access to the internet, nothing's holding us back from an endless flow of diverse music that can be shared by anyone to anyone through a myriad of interesting ways like facebook and instant messenger. Of course, you know that the answer is a confused but emphatic "WRONG!" The problem is that as the technology becomes more complex so do the legal and ethical issues surrounding the access to music. On one hand, shouldn't all music be free and open, available in as many ways as possible? On the other hand, doesn't that defeat the entire purpose of intellectual property, that the artist may be rewarded with capital, thereby inducing the incentive to create and expose that creation? Before internet proliferation, intellectual property law was pretty cut and dry; the model worked. Nowadays, everyone disagrees because the possibilities are seemingly endless, which is to say extremely convoluted.
Many try to give an easy response like, keep the music free and emerging artists can make money off of live shows. Well that's great, except for those musicians whose music is impossible to reproduce live. Plus, if you recorded a second Abbey Road, wouldn't you want to receive some frekin royalties for the effort?! So, do we build up walls and shut everything down? Not if we want a society that is open, evolving, and creatively free! OK you've read this for, time for a solution... I have no f--ing clue how to solve this quagmire, I'm not God (not yet at least), and I'm wary/unsure as to what the future holds for the music industry...
But right now (and we're supposed to "be here now" right?), Right Now, I honestly feel that the holistic nature of music, as a whole, is the greatest it has ever been in human history, far and away- because- There is No dominating genre, No popular vs unpopular, who cares about top 40 when everything is localized and universal, when you can go from bluegrass to electro in two clicks... If video killed the radio-star then the internet turned the sky black or made us all into stars. Every culture, every kind of music, every individual artist is present, mixing, and resounding harmoniously (pun intended) all around us. It's like Stephen Colbert said, "Remixing is Okay."
There are currently many interesting ways to discover music on the internet legally without downloading torrents and without stepping on any big toes in the vastly growing mp3 blogosphere. One is Pandora, which is superbly designed to help you discover artists similar to whatever artists you already like by typing what you already like into their search engine. Let a few ads in and the music will stream all day taking you from one obscure jazz musician or one pretentious indie singer to another after another. However, what's so interesting about Pandora is how well the details of its use represent the current state of the music industry: Confusion (for example 40 hours a month free then a 99 cent fee, no direct or on-demand playing of a song, and no more than 4 songs by an artist in a 3 hour period). So, yes, it is an excellent way to open up to new music but the lack of user control given to very particular and confusing rules is well just weird.
Another is Playlist.com and this site basically rocks! I let it play all day while at work. There is a huge amount of music to choose from, you can play songs immediately, you can organize playlists any way you want, AND you can discover new similar music because every search also gives you a list of playlists that other users like yourself have made which include that artist or song in it. It's free and there's just visual ads. It's still funny though, there's absolutely no Beatles for one thing. It's basically a massive user-operated streaming site of songs gathered from all over the blogosphere (as far as I can tell? not perfectly sure how they get all those songs, but they are there!), so NO downloading, just playing. Seems fair to me. Playlist.com says they are currently working on integrating their platform into facebook, which, if done right, could be very fun. Maybe sites like playlist.com and pandora are an answer for the time being (although it's still a mystery as to which artists' content is connected and which is blocked). And when we want to leave the internet to play "detachable" music, there's always lawbreaking (not that I condone smoking pot while downloading torrents, just saying..), or going to a good old fashion corporate-run music store. - Markos!
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