Copying, copyright and originality: imitation, transformation and popular musicians

Abstract

With copyright becoming ever more important for business and government, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the practices and values associated with copying in popular music culture and advocates a more critical approach to notions of originality. Drawing from interviews with working musicians this article challenges the approaches to copying and popular music that pitch corporate notions of piracy against creative sharing by citizens. It explores differing approaches to the circulation of recordings and identifies three distinct types of creative copying: i) learning through imitation, ii) copying as transformation, iii) copying for commercial opportunity. The article then considers how copying is caught between a commercial necessity for familiar musical products that must conform to existing expectations and a copyright legislative rationale requiring original sounds with individual owners. The article highlights how legacies from a long history of human copying as a means of acquiring knowledge and skills leads to a collision of creative musical practices, commercial imperatives and copyright regulation and results in a series of unavoidable tensions around originality and copying that are a central characteristic of cultural production.Keywords: musicians, copying, copyright, recording industry, originality. Yet, copying has increasingly been perceived as a problem by music industry trade organisations seeking to profit from selling commodities to consumers, whilst maintaining a legal regulatory framework premised on intellectual property. In this paper we explore the tensions as popular music practice collides with competing artistic impulses, commercial incentives and legal imperatives. We draw from interviews with professional UK based musicians working mainly within and across rock, jazz and sample based genres, and those who work with and represent musicians, in order to open up discussion about broad similarities regardless of differences of genre and cultural identity. The quotations and paraphrased issues in this paper are drawn from in-depth interviews with 21 full time working musicians (some also gaining income from giving instrumental tuition), aged between their early 20s and early 60s. We selectively approached musicians with sustained careers of releasing recordings and performing and with some degree of experience of practices relating to copying and copyright. The aim of this study was very much to explore issues in depth through qualitative research, asking musicians to articulate and to reflect upon matters that they rarely address overtly in their practice. Whilst keen to hear from practitioners working across different genres within popular music, as broadly understood, and to get a sense of how attitudes and practices may have changed over time, we did not seek a 'representative sample' of anything (aware also of the practical and philosophical problems of making any claims about any 'sample'). We did not ask musicians how they defined their class, racial o...

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“…115 Moreover, copyright's emphasis on original work is highly dissonant with the ways popular musicians learn their craft, identify with established genres, build audiences, and push artistic boundaries. 116 Music's inherent ephemerality relative to work based on text or images is especially instructive of the limits of copyright law. 117 Jacques Attali went so far as to theorize the economics of music as "prophetic" of coming economic, political, and legal trends in other sectors.…”

K-pop boot camps in choreographic co-creative labor

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Does Copyright Imitation Impact Purchase Behaviour in the Entertainment Industry: A PLS-SEM Analysis of Gen Z’s Brand Recognition in Africa?

“…The economic impact of imitated music sharing and downloading remains a significant concern for Gen Z musicians who traditionally relied on regular income from online record sales rather than touring, session work, and live performances (Negus et. al., 2017).…”