Kembrew McLeod

MP3s Are Killing Home Taping: The Rise of Internet Distribution and Its Challenge to the Major Label Music Monopoly

The phrase “home taping is killing music”—a slogan invented and heavily promoted by major labels to combat the unauthorized duplication of music in the early-1980s—now sounds quaint after the rise of digital distribution. Because the legal arguments surrounding the trading of copyrighted music on file-sharing networks have been extensively debated elsewhere, this article primarily focuses on the way this alternative distribution system poses a very real challenge to major labels. That music monopoly, which has been in place for a century, was able to secure its dominance because it controlled the means of production—something that is no longer the case, because recording, production and distribution costs have radically dropped in price since the 1990s. This article, which operates in a journalistic mode, places into historical context the 1990s compact disc boom and the subsequent rise of digital distribution. The consumer-led file-sharing explosion forced an unwilling music industry into the online marketplace, something that this article argues has been a boon for those working outside of the major label system. This has opened the door for small labels and independent artist-entrepreneurs to use these relatively inexpensive technologies to disseminate their music and circumvent the clogged, payola-drenched playlists of corporate radio.

One and a Half Stars: A Critique of Rock Criticism in North America

As a particular type of gatekeeper, rock critics play a significant role in shaping the representations of artists for an admittedly small, but influential, population, as well as establishing an artists place in music history. In Sound Effects , Simon Frith (1983) maintains that rock critics are ‘opinion leaders’ and are the ‘ideological gatekeepers’ of the community for which they write. Additionally, I argue that rock critics function as Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals’ who articulate the ideas held by the population of which they are a part (Gramsci 1971, pp. 5-14). The community that rock critics represent and speak for is made up of an overlapping network that comprises those connected with college radio, record collectors, local music scene participants, musicians and various record company employees, among others. Frith (1996, p. 18) argues in Performing Rites that if ‘social relations are constituted in cultural practice, then our sense of identity and difference is established in the process of discrimination ’. By understanding the ways in which evaluations are made within the communities that rock critics are a part of, we can gain a better understanding of the communities themselves. Because there are no sustained scholarly writings that examine rock criticism in North America from a historical, sociological or communicative perspective, it is important to begin examining the profession of the rock critic, as well as the discourse generated by rock criticism.

How Copyright Law Changed Hip-Hop: An Interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee

When Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, in 1988, it was as if the album had landed from another planet. Nothing sounded like it at the time. It Takes a nation came frontloaded with sirens, squeals, and squawks that augmented the chaotic, collaged backing tracks over which PE. frontman Chuck D laid his politically and poetically radical rhymes. He rapped about white supremacy, capitalism, the music industry, black nationalism, and—in the case of “Caught, Can i Get a Witness?”—digital sampling: “Caught, now in court ‘cause i stole a beat / This is a sampling sport / Mail from the courts and jail / Claims i stole the beats that i rail... i found this mineral that i call a beat / i paid zero.”