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SjoerdOppenheimFirstEssay 3 - 04 Jan 2015 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Who Will Survive in America: Winners and Losers in the New Music Industry | | | New high quality streaming services such as Spotify provide users with an all-you-can-eat business model for listening to music. While Spotify is quite popular, it success totally depends on the willingness of the musicians to have their music available on Spotify. Big classical bands such as Led Zeppelin and the Beatles aren’t available, and Thom Yorke and Atoms for Peace recently withdrew their music from the streaming service, criticizing the company’s business model by saying that it ‘stifles’ the new artists, who only get approximately half a cent per stream per song. In order to be a valuable addition to the music industry, Spotify has to fix this otherwise more artists will be unwilling to collaborate with the streaming service.
The internet is a place where in theory everyone is equal. The old notion of consumer producer won’t hold anymore. While this may be devastating for the old music industry, it creates a lot of opportunities for musicians and fans to interact in a more direct way with one another. Everyone who fails to understand that, will have to play the second fiddle.
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I think the essay could be improved by making its argument clearer.
At the beginning of your story, five companies controlled more than
90% of the world's popular music. Now, four companies do. Musicians
have many more choices for distribution, but large "service platform"
companies, some of them controlling hardware and software used by
consumers (like Apple and Google) and some of them embedded in
national popular culture and commerce (like TenCent) sublicense
exclusive or non-exclusive rights to distribution from those
companies. "Streaming," which is basically slow downloading
accompanied by technological restrictions over redistribution by
consumers, has been sold to people as "convenient." It means, in
technical and legal fact, spying on their use of music and
eliminating their rights under the "first sale doctrine," which has
been crucial to the "copyright bargain" since the early 20th century.
So I'm not sure who has won and who has lost, or why, on the basis of
your analysis. Perhaps rather than beginning with an anecdote and
moving immediately to broad generalities you could state at the
outset the idea you want the reader to take away, and use most of the
remainder of your essay to present the facts that support your
proposed conclusion. In the process, I suspect, you will raise some
questions that, in a short essay, should be left to the reader,
perhaps qualifying or making more multi-variate the proposition from
which you began.
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