Greetings fellow music lovers, my name is Mr. Sofalumpkins, I have been asked by this fine group of gentlemen to contribute to this blog, I'll be writing on a wide range of topics, all music related of course, but I guess first off, I should tell you all a little about myself.
I am a trans-dimensional gestalt entity who entered this host body on November 1st 2008, the previous "occupant" had gone way beyond the terms of the lease and was for all intents and purposes "squatting" so he had to be forcibly evicted, the technical term for this event is "soul jacking", please refer to your cosmic instruction manual for further reading on; what to do when being soul jacked, how to avoid a soul jacking, plus, contacts for all the relevant agencies that deal with "post jacking stress disorder" and all the "post corporeal rehabilitation groups".
Now thats all cleared up I can broach my first topic for this blog;
The state of the industry...
Contrary to popular and wide spread belief, there is NOTHING wrong with the state of the music industry, all that has happened in recent years is that all of the holes in the present model, though i now refer to this as the old one, have been highlighted and are now starting to cause massive failure with it. Things are not as bleak as some will have you believe, the sky is not falling, its just its chemical make-up that is changing, let me elaborate on this.
The problem with the old model is that it is based on the notion of how we exploit "intellectual copyright", we have to be clear about our choice of words here and no other word than "exploit" can be used in this context. Now lets put that word into another context and see what results we get "exploitation of children for cheap labour" for example is a great context within which to understand why exploitation is a bad thing. Okay, so you may argue about the use of the word "exploitation" within the context of "intellectual copyright", well, you wont get very far with that argument as the right to "exploit" the "intellectual copyright" of an artist is made explicit in every legally binding document within the industry.
You may well ask what the problem is here, well, its very simple, music can be copyrighted, but when you consider that every possible arrangement of chords, melodic structure and rhythm have already been covered by the classical composers and tribes in africa that developed the first poly rhythms you have to ask yourself who owns the music the industry wishes to exploit? Anything over 50 years old is copyright free in europe, i believe its 75 in north america, so, if its all been done before, and it is now out of copyright, its free for all to use and abuse, so who owns it? This oxymoron is made all the more troubling when you consider that most modern music is made from samples and, well, just noises, theres actually little to no musical content whatsoever, so how can you copyright something that cannot be scored? So now this comes down to the ownership of the recording, but this implies some kind of performance surely?
My point here is simple, the only thing a musician can rightfully ask to be paid for in terms of intellectual property is the actual performance itself, that being the case, on the surface the dance music industry appears to have been living in a bubble economy, and, unfortunately, that bubble is about to burst.
Embrace performance, or die, this is how evolution works, and embrace change and the new model, or go the way of the dinosaur, and in keeping with this new ethos i present to you my first free track available for download below.
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