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Music


The terms used to describe the various genres of music are constantly changing some with good reason but others for the sake of just changing the words . I look at music with two simple distinctions . There is good music and bad music those are the two i mostly use.
Lets look at the various genres that are present today .

 

HIP HOP

 

What is hip hop ? According to wikipedia it is "Hip hop music is a genre of music typically consisting of a rhythmic style of speaking called rap over backing beats performed on a turntable by a dj."

 

"a type of popular music in which the subject of the songs is often politics or society and the words are spoken rather than sung."



Hip hop is both a music genre and a cultural movement in urban communities starting in the 1970s , predominantly in the African -American communities. Hip hop has grown to be  a fusion of rap and rnb . Hip hop is recognised from its flamboyant base lines as well as the voice over style . It is not really easy to define but I can only say when you hear it you will know it . As the various genres that fall under what  I call urban music have evolved they have inevitably fused with each other providing some of the best sounds of our time. A more detailed look at hip hop and its origins can be found at wikipedia . I know as with any user generated content there many be room for error but i think by and large the resource is fairly accurate on this subject.

 

Rap

 

According to wikipedia rap is defined as "Rapping (also known as emceeing, MCing, spitting, or just rhyming) is the rhythemic spoken delivery of rhymes and wordplay, one of the elements of hip hop music and culture."

 

According to the cambridge english dictionary Rap is "a type of popular music with a strong rhythm in which the words are spoken, not sung."
Rap aka emceeing, aka spitting is the rhythmic delivery of rhymes and word play over a baseline. The culture around rap is the same as hip hop which has confused a lot of people over the years. Rap and the hip hop culture are intertwined . Rap is the term commonly used to describe the aggressively mass market produced music that has rapping in it  aka bashment this has roots in Jamaican popular culture in the 1970s. There is garage aka grime has roots in the fusion of dance , house and hip hop it emerged in the 1990s . Enough of trying to define what everything is I will give you my view according to what i enjoy. In a set i enjoy everything depending with the flow you can have all genres . I pay very little attention to genres but all my attention is on what is good . One can party all day and night with good music despite which category is happens to fall under.

 Although people love to create all these genres it is becoming quite common for artists to combine the different genres of music which in my view is fantastic and provides some great music. I personally think there are only two genres of music good music and bad music thats all there is to it but hey i can only wish .

 

Music Business models 

 

In the 21st century there are a number of business models for recording artists as well as record labels . What I find interesting is how people are responding to the emergence iof technology and the desperate file to resist change some artists seem to be adopting.

 

 Traditional music journey for an artists would begin with some underground exposure and a record label executive would spot you and offer you an contract and they go on to manage and distribute your content. It workied but the problem with this models is there are too many middle men in the process to such an extent that the artists receives less and less money and the price goes up and up for the fans. This is what gave rise to some independent artists .

 

In the olden days it was very very expensive to setup the whole network of the recording technology and you definately needed distribution but the internet changed all that. Now pretty much anyone can distribute their music world wide with a click of the button but with this came a new issue of digital rights management as a result of file sharing.

 

This has been a matter that has put blinkers in the eyes of a number of emerging talent . They are so worried about protecting their music they seem to have forgotten that actually you make music for your fans . Some bands have moved to a model where they give music for free and you inturn can give them money you think they deserve . This has its pros and cons. I do not condone file sharing in anyway as I understand the true cost of making music is high and as a recording artists myself understand how much these artist spend in the process so you should pay them for their hard work.Having said that artists should not exort money from their fans realistic pricing of music is a good idea.

 

I can across and article by Lawrence Lessig  a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. A long-time advocate for copyright reform and information freedom, he is the founder and architect of Creative Commons.

 

I thought that he hit the problem on the head when he gave the interview below.

 

There’s a record company in Brazil, Trauma Records, which is the largest Brazilian Record Company, which has begun to use creative commons licenses to release their content under totally free terms, but you can use it for non-commercial purposes only. And their strategy is that in the 21st Century, the business of a record label is brand. So the way you build brand is to make great content and make it accessible and then you begin to sell wholesale, like collections of content or sell content for ring tone downloads or things like as an alternative way to raise money for the artists as opposed to selling, you know, per copy the content which the artist produces. That might prove to be a very – much more successful business model than the current business model of the record industry and if it, then the competition will drive businesses towards that model rather than to the current model of controlling, in the Sony way, the number of copies of each song that’s distributed. But I think what we need is lots of competition to see what actually works and lots more freedom especially for artists to begin to fuel that competition.

 

One of the hardest things we found in the context of the sampling license, which was again suggested to us by Geppeto Geil and the group Negative Land, is not that artists don’t think it’s a great idea. It’s that the record labels won’t permit them to experiment with it. So, you know, Geil himself wanted to be able to release his content under this type of license, but his record label was very hesitant to permit that kind of licensing of this type of content. And I think that’s a very short-sided response by record labels and also unfortunate for artists because I think what we need is different views about how best to do this and lots of experiments with these different views and the best people to drive those experiments, in my view, would be artists. So we should be reinforcing the power of artists to control their destiny, their copyright destiny in this sense as way to figure out what the best model is for the digital age. I think tinkering with the structure of rights in a way that drives the bottom line of creativity – that says, “Let’s encourage more creativity,” either by lowering the costs of being a creator or by making sure that the rights make sense for the particular form of creativity, we would improve the system for both consumers and for creators.

 

If you think of your business as producing bits of plastic, which are sold through exclusive distribution channels, there’s no doubt than an alternative that tries to free up access to content is in competition with that business. So a record label that says, “Our job is to sell pieces of plastic or vinyl or cassette tapes,” you know, I think is right to worry about technologies for distributing content in freer ways. But I think what many labels are beginning to recognize is that that’s neither an interesting nor profitable business or there’s more profitable businesses to be in. It’s not that there isn’t a role for a record label in the 21st Century. It’s just a different role, right? So think about the history of publishing as an example. It used to be publishers published, right? They actually had printing presses that printed books. There are no publishers that publish in that sense anymore, right? They’ve outsourced all of that to another industry. There’s a very concentrated industry of, you know, basically a couple business that are in the business of printing the books and what publishers do is all the value added of deciding who to publish, making sure it’s good quality and doing the marketing on top of it, right? That’s a radical change in the structure of the business.

 

I think publishers are happy with that change, but it signals that what the businesses ought be focusing on is, what’s the valued added that we can bring given the technology of the day? And I think that particular music industry executives are beginning to think like that in the context of music. You know, it’s not the value added of controlling distribution of bits of plastic. That’s a very boring business to be in. It’s much more interesting to be in a business of trying to – much more effectively figure out what content is good or what niche markets can we serve or what ways can we actually make our product more accessible or more valuable to users when they get it? And to the extent publishers – record labels think like that, I have lots of face that the market place will reward them and drive the businesses in that direction.

 

We can only watch the direction the industry is going to go .

 

 

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