nihil alienum

sobre la industria musical (Yochai Benkler)

dandan | 30 Enero, 2008 23:53 | Share and Enjoy:

Estoy leyendo "The Wealth of Networks", de Yochai Benkler, y hoy he leido un trozo que tiene que ver con la historia del canon, con la rectificación de "El País" al artículo que publicó sobre "piratería" en España (y que se ha vivido en Menéame como un triunfo de los internautas sobre el punto de vista inicial de un medio tradicional) y con la reciente sentencia del Tribunal de Justicia de la UE sobre la no obligación de las telefónicas a facilitar la identidad de los usuarios de P2P (está la cosa movidilla). Lo copio tal cual.

Music in the nineteenth century was largely a relational good. It was some-
thing people did in the physical presence of each other: in the folk way
through hearing, repeating, and improvising; in the middle-class way of buy-
ing sheet music and playing for guests or attending public performances; or
in the upper-class way of hiring musicians. Capital was widely distributed
among musicians in the form of instruments, or geographically dispersed in
the hands of performance hall (and drawing room) owners. Market-based
production depended on performance through presence. It provided oppor-
tunities for artists to live and perform locally, or to reach stardom in cultural
centers, but without displacing the local performers. With the introduction
of the phonograph, a new, more passive relationship to played music was
made possible in reliance on the high-capital requirements of recording,
copying, and distributing specific instantiations of recorded music-records.
What developed was a concentrated, commercial industry, based on massive
financial investments in advertising, or preference formation, aimed at get-
ting ever-larger crowds to want those recordings that the recording executives
had chosen. In other words, the music industry took on a more industrial
model of production, and many of the local venues-from the living room
to the local dance hall-came to be occupied by mechanical recordings
rather than amateur and professional local performances. This model
crowded out some, but not all, of the live-performance-based markets (for
example, jazz clubs, piano bars, or weddings), and created new live-
performance markets-the megastar concert tour. The music industry
shifted from a reliance on Scholarly Lawyer and Joe Einstein models to
reliance on Romantic Maximizer and Mickey models. As computers became
more music-capable and digital networks became a ubiquitously available
distribution medium, we saw the emergence of the present conflict over the
regulation of cultural production-the law of copyright-between the
twentieth-century, industrial model recording industry and the emerging am-
ateur distribution systems coupled, at least according to its supporters, to a
reemergence of decentralized, relation-based markets for professional perfor-
mance artists.