29 July 2008
Music Technology: Controversies
Easily transferable digital files raise copyright and other legal issues
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
There is no way to provide the final word on the rapidly shifting landscape of music technology. The fact that digital technology allows the content of a recording to be liberated from its physical medium creates controversy. Earlier recording technologies involve a process of “translation” from one medium to another: analog recording, for example, translates sound waves in the air into physical impressions on the surface of a disc or arrangements of iron oxide molecules on a magnetic tape. But digital recording involves the translation of musical sound into pure information, encoded in streams of ones and zeros. This means that music can be transmitted, reproduced, and manipulated in a “virtual” form, free of the constraints of any particular technology. This development has raised questions that will no doubt shape the course of American popular music for years to come: What does it mean when a consumer licenses the right to use the contents of an album, rather than buying a single copy of it in a store? How can copyright be enforced – indeed, what is the meaning of the term “copyright” – when thousands of consumers can download the same piece of music simultaneously over the Internet? How will the transformation of music into pure information affect musicians and consumers? If “Video Killed the Radio Star” – to cite the first song promoted on MTV – will the Internet kill the CD store? What will the music industry of tomorrow look like?
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
