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Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture is an interdisciplinary introduction to the economics, history, and law that shape the music we love. The book has an innovative design, combining accessible prose with timelines, infographics, flowcharts, and excerpts from a graphic novel. Through a series of chapters that take readers step by step through the fundamentals of copyright and creativity, Jennifer Jenkins clarifies basic concepts, lays out an engaging history, points out cultural effects of legal rules, and tells scores of stories of great musical controversies, past and present. The book is paired with a series of Spotify and YouTube playlists, so that readers can listen to the material under review. The end result is neither dry nor obscure. And this is as it should be, because the legal rules surrounding our musical culture are both important and captivating.
You have probably heard stories where one musician is accused of copying another’s song. Maybe one of your favorite artists has been involved in such a dispute. By the time you finish reading this book, you know what the law might say about it: the lines it would draw between legitimate inspiration by shared cultural themes and outright theft that will result in substantial monetary damages. But you will know a lot more. You will have explored how a society even comes to think of music as something that can be owned: the cultural, technological, economic, and legal prerequisites of the system. You will have traced out the history of the great technologies that affected music, from musical notation—the invention of writing, musically speaking—through to the printing press, the player piano and phonograph, the radio, the internet, and generative AI. You will have thought through how we set up incentives to make, and to distribute, the music all of us love. How can society ensure that the next great composer or performer devotes her time and talent to that task instead of something else? How can we set up a system that gives creators control of their work, and yet still leaves free the genres, styles, techniques, and other building blocks that make up the musical commons, upon which all artists draw?
By the time you finish this book you should be able to have an informed opinion about where we need to strike that balance, and whether the law we have today has done a good job of doing so. You will understand the legal difficulties in clearing samples and in navigating the tangled thicket of music licenses, each invented to deal with a particular technology of the past. You will delve into evolving business models, today’s streaming economy, and the challenges posed by generative AI. But you will also have gone deeper. For example, the book examines the history of attempts to control music in American culture along racial lines: from the legal and social barriers that prevented African-American and other minority musicians from receiving the credit and financial reward their talents deserved, to the vexed question of appropriation and the line between benign mutual cultural influence and unjust, uncredited exploitation. Along the way, you will get to think about the law, culture, aesthetics, and economics of an art form that touches us more profoundly than we know.
