✘ Rip, Mix, Burn - redux
And: Data Capitalism + Algorithmic Racism; Meming patronage into existence; Copyright under siege; Ideas to keep your music scene alive; DeepSeek FAQ
It’s the 1990s, they heyday of a now old-school music industry. People listen to radio, watch MTV, buy CDs and merch and tickets to gigs. Life seems simple and the majors have a good grasp of what’s going on. But consumers see things differently - more and more they want digital products and cheaper products and they want it faster. There were, of course, also plenty of people who saw what was coming and the need to deal with it.
“Common ground among online service providers, copyright owners, and consumers need not be a crash site along the information superhighway. Rather, collective licensing on a blanket basis can be the mechanism by which these groups steer clear of that impending collision.”
Bennett M. Lincoff, former head of Legal Affairs for New Media at ASCAP, 1995
Collective licensing has been the solution to new distribution formats since the 19th Century. It makes sense that someone so deeply involved with a leading PRO would suggest it as a solution again. But it wasn’t the solution that would do away with all friction. The Internet created new business models:
“The digital revolution will create a future in which music is like water: ubiquitous and free-flowing … [music will become] a very potent ‘liquid’ pricing system that incorporates subscriptions, bundles of various media types, multi-access deals, and added-value services.”
David Kusek, Gerd Leonhard, Susan Gedutis Lindsay, ‘The Future of Music’, 2005
When music became digital, it became water. Both in the sense of the above quote, but also in the sense that it’s a public good - people should have access to music. But it’s still a business - there’s money to be made here. What’s more, music is culture and the resonance of this culture allows others to make money, too. Apple’s Rip, Mix, Burn episode from 2001 is the lens through which to best understand the complexities of music’s digital business model. One that still remains mostly untangled today.
Rip, Mix, Burn
Let’s start with the ad. Here we have a bunch of artists who are seemingly giving the green light for everyone to rip their music, mix it together with other songs, and burn it to a CD. Now, there might be an argument that for home use, this wouldn’t be copyright infringement. But it got very close to telling people how to subvert copyright law - as if they needed telling though! In a way, then, Apple was showing people they could use their hardware and software to put their illegal music on CD or to put their legal music on a CD and share it illegally. However, in another way, this iteration of the iMac that the Rip, Mix, Burn campaign supported simply offered people what they wanted: fast access to music and to consume as they desired.
If I made it, I own it, right?
Not to get too caught up in the copyright complex, but if we follow people like Lawrence Lessig, copyright mostly just keeps creative recordings of ideas away from people to use. Here, the idea of consumption moves towards creation already. You rip, you mix, which means you curate something new into being. Then you burn and this new collection is brought into the world in recorded form. Doesn’t this constitute a new copyright? Should it not just be freely available for others to keep building on. These are the precarious conversations that emerge through the Rip, Mix, Burn ethos.
This is what it became - an ethos. Apple just tapped into it with their ad campaign (and themselves backtracked within 12 months and their ‘don’t steal music’ iPod launch). We can go back to early hip hop and sampling. We can look to our current time and think about Generative AI and Large Language Models. All of these conversations were and remain precarious. Just as they’re important to have, they are difficult to have. Copyright started out - and I’m talking 200+ years ago - to assign ownership for limited periods of time. When the Rip, Mix, Burn campaign went up this was up to 70 to 95 years. But do we still understand what we’re protecting? And, do we understand who we are protecting from and what copyright should be protecting for?
Assemble
There’s no closure here. As soon as we start to assemble things that already exist they die and something else gets created. All of this is relational. Alex Reid talked about rip-mix-burn systems becoming media. He used the example of DJ Spooky and Joshua Roman reworking, or remixing, Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place.
The interplay of sounds, sonic textures, instruments, and technology all serve to create a new system. The interrelations become a media network. It’s in this space that we might be able to let go of the notion of a song that can’t be copied. Both the idea behind it can be copied and the digital manifestation of it can be copied. Both can be protected legally, but will functionally be absurdly easy to rip, to mix, and to burn.
LINKS
🪪 Data Capitalism + Algorithmic Racism (Yeshimabeit Milner, Amy Traub)
“This report uses the term “data capitalism” to describe an economic model built on the extraction and commodification of data and the use of big data and algorithms as tools to concentrate and consolidate power in ways that dramatically increase inequality along lines of race, class, gender, and disability.”
✘ It’s not a recent report, but it’s so important to keep sharing this message. And, there’s some great advice in there on how to resist data capitalism.
💱 The Modern Gala: How Latashá and C.Y. Lee are meming patronage into existence (MacEagon Voyce)
“Amidst an exploitative music industry and extractive creator economy, could patronage nouveau become a blueprint for music’s future? Can Lee and Alcindor effectively instantiate their modern-day reprisal of a centuries-old relationship?”
✘ There’s a lot of room to explore these kinds of relationships. They can take so many different forms as well. From a microgrant to a full on patronage. A lot of people have the means to do this - let’s hope they find the inspiration to do so.
🪃 Copyright under siege: How big tech uses AI and China to exploit creators (Virginie Berger)
“These exaggerated claims distract from the real issue: the exploitation of copyrighted materials for profit without consent or compensation and the consolidation of power under the guise of innovation. By framing AI as a universal solution, corporations obscure the significant gaps between its marketed capabilities and its actual potential, while further marginalizing creators and the intellectual property they depend on.”
✘ Virginie remains the best voice for understanding how far down the drain of copyright protection we’ve gone with AI already. It’s crucial that we understand the impact of this - and who knows, perhaps a silver lining can be some inspiration to build outside of the music copyright complex instead of against it.
💿 25 ideas to keep your music scene alive in 2025 (Sean Adams)
“I admit that some of these ideas are very obvious but sometimes those are small acts are the ones we overlook. Turning these everyday ideas into a weekly habit or a monthly act could mend the foundations of your local music scene and help independent acts & labels worldwide.”
✘ All the advice for support in this article is great, however, for me it’s habit that we all need to establish. I lose the habit sometimes myself as well and I’m so happy when I can pick it back up again. Do it for the music scene, but also for your own wellbeing.
😕 DeepSeek FAQ (Ben Thompson)
“[T]he details of what DeepSeek has accomplished — and what they have not — are less important than the reaction and what that reaction says about people’s pre-existing assumptions.”
✘ If you’re curious about the impact of DeepSeek, where this impact stems from, and how it actually works: read this. Basically, they got creative with the chips they did have and accomplished something analysts weren’t expecting. There’s a longer shift happening towards a rising global influence from China, India, and South East Asia more generally. This is another step. It’s also another step towards an efficiency that the West has been chasing since the Industrial Revolution.
MUSIC
First music rec of the year for me and I’m drawn towards Blawan’s BouQ EP - released in early December last year. It’s sonically fantastic, and the title of NPCs making Hot Dinner is just brilliant for the time we’re in right now.