This week we watched a documentary on a company called Napster. Napster was a MP3 file sharing company where users could share any music they had with music other people had. This allowed for people to not pay for each individual CD or record to have access to the music they wanted. This in turn made a lot of record companies and artist mad about lost profit and felt they were being shorted money. Napster was really a head of its time and really kind of set the start of the trend of social media and other music apps like spotify. Now there is so many different way to get music that you either pay for a membership to the service or you can just download them for free from somewhere and it is not really to hard to find. Napster just put all of this into one service where you could physical see how many people and how much music was being traded back and forth. The real problem began when people started trading unreleased music which was hard to do before the internet and this was really the first time something like this could be done but now you see unreleased music being leaked all of the time. This all comes down to copyrights and what is allowed and what isn’t. With music I feel it is very hard to tell people they can’t trade music with each other because people are always looking for a way to save money and still get things they want and trading music is one of the ways to do that. When its comes down to people pirating the music this is wrong because no one has payed for that copy to the music so you shouldn’t be able to trade that music.

I think something that was not talked about in the documentary is how the music industry has started to change in recent years and artist are starting to come at the record labels because of how much money they make off of the artist and how much control they get of the music. Artist want to have as much freedom as possible when making music and also want to make tons of money just like every person would want to do. Record companies then become the middle man and end up taking a good amount of money and own the copyrights to the music which helps them keep artist under control. This is the reason why you have started to see successful artist start there own record label companies like Jay-Z, Kanye, and Eminem along with others to give artist more control. The documentary also talked about a band that had only played on the east coast and had 500 to 700 people and then go to play at a college on the west coast and have thousands of people there who knew the lyrics to every song. These people knew of the band through Napster and without it they never would of had as big of a turn out. This shows how great something like Napster is for a up and coming artist or band and not having to go through a record label would allow for them to make even more money off of sales.

We also read an article about South Park and them being sued for copyright infringement for an episode they aired. This episode showed a parody of a YouTube video call “What what in the butt” that lasted around a minute in a 25 minute episode. The fact that it was a parody and did not last for a substation time comedy central won the lawsuit and this set a precedent for what is allowed with a copyright. There is a lot of different parody accounts that make funny videos about popular songs and movies. Myself and my friends from high school use to watch these parody videos all of the time and would get enjoyment out of them and would then listen to actual songs. When people do stuff like this they are looking to just get a laugh and mean no harm and most of the time people hear the parody and then want to listen to the actual song. This in turn brings more people to listen to the actual artist music. So my friends and I use to listen to parodies from Rucka Rucka Ali on YouTube. Did you ever listen to these parodies or any others?

News Article:

This article talks about reasons why artist are starting their own record labels or becoming indie artist where they make more money and have more creative freedom. This is having an effect on record labels companies and is changing the music industry.

https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/ditto-music-lee-parsons-interview-749510/