Steal Like and Artist

Cultural Studies Review

A review of Margie Borschke’s 'This is Not a Remix: Piracy, Authenticity and Popular Music' (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

2016

relationship. Ives supported Carter’s musical pursuits as a young man and remained a guiding influence throughout his career. As Jan Swafford writes, however, “Carter, whose mature music would owe a great deal to Ives... would pay back his mentor with a baffling mixture of admiration, advocacy, and cold repudiation ” (Swafford 1998: 334). Although he eventually softened his early criticism of Ives and acknowledged his musical debts, Carter was consistently puzzled by the stress in Ives’s music on musical borrowing—i.e., the procedures by which a composer includes material from or refers to pre–existing musical pieces in the context of an original work.1 As Carter put it, Ives’s reliance on quotations accounted for “a disturbing lack of musical and stylistic continuity ” (Perlis 1974: 145). On another occasion, Carter described Ives’s inclusion of popular songs and hymns as “constantly perplexing ” (Edwards 1971: 63).2 In view of these and numerous other statements, it is equally per...

Enterprise and Society, 2007

Musicians have always borrowed and quoted freely from works that inspire them; the practice of “transformative appropriation” through allusion and arrangement is part of the creative process. However, technologies that make duplication easy and affordable have ...

Signal to Noise, 2012

North Carolina Law Review, 2006

Signal to Noise, 2012

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Whenever people's response is 'how dare you!' I consider that a high compliment. First of all, taking from other artists is not illegal in the art world, as it is in the music industry, and second, it is a direct acknowledgment of how we work in painting. Everything you do is based on what came before and what is happening concurrently. I don't see history as monolithic. I feel very free to take and change whatever I want, and that includes borrowing from my contemporaries. If some people are upset because my work has similarities to what they're doing, that's their problem. And if they take from me, that's great! I don't respect these artificial boundaries that artists and people around artists erect to keep you in a certain category. 2 The law takes a more traditional view of appropriation art. Artists re

Documents de treball IEB, 2011

Anecdotal evidence and recent empirical work suggest that music piracy has differential effects on artists depending on their popularity. Existing theoretical literature cannot explain such differential effects since it is exclusively concerned with single-firm models. We present a model with two types of artists who differ in their popularity. We assume that the costs of illegal downloads increase with the scarcity of a recording, and that scarcity is negatively related to the artist's popularity. Moreover, we allow for a second source of revenues for artists apart from CD sales. These alternative revenues depend on an artist's recognition as measured by the number of consumers who obtain his recording either by purchasing the original or downloading a copy. Our findings for the more popular artist generalize a result found by Gayer and Shy (2006) who show that piracy is beneficial to the artist when alternative revenues are important. In our model, however, this does not carry over to the less popular artist, who is often harmed by piracy even when alternative revenues are important. We conclude that piracy tends to reduce musical variety.

This paper looks at the role of sampling in the contemporary music industry, with regards to electronic music subcultures; internet music; and appropriation. It examines the existing legal & cultural environment surrounding sampling, and argues that the practice, through technological advancements, is a typical action fundamental to music and culture - the borrowing/appropriation of ideas. It is here that Richard Dawkin's theory of memetics is applied to the study of musical appropriation, from the macro scale of subcultures/genres to the micro scale musical imitations made every day by creators. This essay includes primary research into contemporary electronic music creator's application of sampling into their art. By combining these sources, it is contested that the current stigma surrounding sampling is actually detrimental to the advancement of contemporary music. This paper was submitted as a dissertation for the music industry management course at UEL, May 2015.

Leonardo Music Journal, 2002

Be cause there is only so much that can be brought forth from a single human composer before a certain sameness sets in, dissatisfied musicians have always sought collaborators. Mozart stole melodies from his pet starling, paying the bird's commission in seed. Who, Mozart or the bird, was the great Viennese composer? Or, which one was responsible for creating the genuine music?