Innovators or Pirates

Are all remixers (including mashup artists, DJs, pastiche and bricolage producers and digital media artists) innovators or thieves? Should you pay for every sample used in a recording or piece of video art?

Personally speaking, I think remixers cannot be divided into innovator or thieves absolutely, because the artists have their own creative but sometimes by using others ideas for the inspiration. This is legal when they use others original works to make some editions or changes to form their own artistic productions. ‘The problem is that innovation does not exist in a vacuum. Ideas and inspiration bubble up from the sources around us’ (Gettler, 2004). I agree with this statement because our world is full of different kinds of information, any productions may take examples by others relative productions. For example, before MP3 comes out, people use Walkman to listen to music, MP3 can be seen as the advanced results of ‘Walkman’.       

Remix includes many types of artistic creations such as mashup artists, pastiche, DJs and various mainstreams. In relating to music field, remix is a musical form to use many other types of music such as hip-pop, R&B, Jazz etc. to take shapes in a particular remix music production. Remixers can be seen as a creation of artistic style, it blends diversified elements in different views of arts, but it uses for reference of those existent artworks. For instance, a song with a remix version is based on the changes of the original song. Furthermore, many Japanese singers like to make remix versions of their songs to create a new music album, then selling in the market for some commercial purposes. There is a remix version of <Heaven>, the original song is made by piano instrumental. It sang by a famous Japanese female singer Hamasaki Ayumi.

‘The development of the Internet and MP3s – digitally compressed music files – opened up an alternative mode of distribution’ (Martin, Moore & Salter, 2010). With answering the question should I pay for every sample used in a recording or piece of video art? My response may be no. Actually, nowadays many people will choose to download music from the Internet rather than to buy the album CDs. It becomes a convenient and fast way to enjoy the music better than pay for it. However, this may impact to those music industries, downloading MP3 freely on the Internet can cause the decrease of selling recording CDs. Despite the defect, Internet is a good platform for those digital media artists, they can create their artworks by using Internet sources freely and made to their own artistic creations.

Reference

Gettler, L 2004, ‘Balancing battle between pirates and innovators’, retrieved 30 April 2004, < http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/29/1083224515491.html>.

Martin, B, Moore, C and Salter, C. 2010, ‘Sharing music files: tactics of a challenge to the industry’, First Monday, vol. 15, no. 12 <http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2986/2680>.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wqDEKywPxs