Plunderphonics

After reading Plunderphonics by John Oswald I'm uncertain what point he was trying to make. I couldn't tell if the theme was that sampling is acceptable, the argument of sampling is altogether superfluous/erroneous, or if the piece was just a distillation of our current views on sampling music.

I did find Oswald's mention of imitating Bruce Springsteen to be interesting. If we recognize that imitating another musicians sound is legal while using small samples is illegal than it would appear the issue is really about property and not creativity. We talk about musicians as artists, and we talk about protecting artists' creative works - but it appears its not their creativity they care about, its the sliver of the sound spectrum they stumbled upon which proves to sell.

Along the lines of audio "property," I personally reject the argument by popular musicians that pirating music is such a debilitating crime to their industry. There was once a time when music existed but highly replicate-able media did not. Back then it was all about live performances. It was simply the coincidental invention of recording media that allowed the music industry to enter this golden age of working far less and making exponentially more money. The way I see it, we are simply returning to a place in music production where you have to work for what you make. If you want millions of dollars, then make great music and play a lot of shows. In fact, in a live performance market you want your sound to spread virally to get everyone clambering to see your shows. The "stealing" of music is not the death of the music industry, its simply the 2nd transformation of the industry that comes with an implicit marketing strategy.

I also found the reference to the public domain to take an interesting perspective. It is true that we are utterly surrounded by music and audio. Today a good question really is: How can we possibly create audio outside the context of others' compositions? We hear them almost without pause (after all silence is one of the most valuable commodities in sound today, right?). Its no secret that our ears are very sensitive, and our memories and emotional center are certainly tied to what we hear. Therefore strict stipulations about the few contexts in which a composer/musician is allowed to skate on the fringe of sounding vaguely similar to another "artist's" work seems almost inhumane.