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1. Introduction

Our formative musical experiences, like our first memories of smell and touch, leave their imprint. Memories of primary home tape recording sessions when with my sister and neighbours we learnt the art of pressing 'play' and 'record', simultaneously. On our first attempt, we had picked up the radio's 'golden oldies' broadcast of Tina Turner's 'Nutbush City Limits'¹ plus our full-scale conversation about what we should tape next.

For this chapter, such experiences seemed like a fitting place to start. Within the 21st century new digital technologies are reinventing how we create, distribute and share music. Borrowing the title from Radiohead's album 'Hail to the Thief'², this chapter attempts to explore how digital technologies are used and repurposed by people to create new forms of musical expression and connection. Drawing on recent discussions on copyright laws and sampling culture, changes in the production and distribution of music have been laud and denigrated by music industry professionals. Such responses clearly indicate the need for a greater understanding of how we create music, which could potentially lead to more thoughtful approaches to copyright and the use of new technologies within music. Exploring in depth how we create music, this paper illustrates with specific examples from research using existing and emerging technologies how central appropriation and the repurposing of existing material are to the creative process. This work is examined through the lens of sociocultural theory, and a brief overview of this position along with understandings of creativity and appropriation from this perspective is provided.

In sum, the chapter draws on current trends and discourses within the music industry, relating them to everyday practices of young and professional musicians, and exploring how through the use of digital technologies we are continually finding new modes through which to musically express ourselves. The chapter concludes with some final thoughts on future directions within this area.


2. The rise of the machines

Since the advent of cassette tapes and home recording devices in the 1970s, the music industry has continually tried to control and legitimise the practices of music copying and distribution (Chestermann and Lipman 1988; Plumleigh 1990). The current proliferation of high-speed, wireless networks and peer-to-peer file sharing has changed and challenged the global music market (Fessenden 2002; Toynbee 2001). The music industry continually cries out that downloading and file sharing is crippling their markets, leading to reduced ticket, CD and record sales (eg Quantum 2004 report for ARIA, Australian Recording Industry Association). On the other hand independent studies (Goetz 2004; Oberholzer and Strumpf 2004) show that this 'cry of wolf' is questionable and in some cases unsubstantiated. Zentner (2004) in his large-scale study highlights how complex it is to track and predict such a link. For example he found that on average people who regularly download music online do not buy less music. However those with broadband access were found to buy less music compared to those that did not have broadband.

Despite contradictory findings, one outcome is clear; the result of our increasingly networked world is that the global music industry is pressuring governments to change copyright laws. Recent changes in the law have enabled the industry to sue individuals and organisations who are engaging in acts of music piracy via free peer-to-peer shareware. For example the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA, www.riaa.com) provides a comprehensive online overview of cases it is processing as well as successful settlements. The RIAA has particularly clamped down on college networks where illegal free peer-to-peer networks are commonplace. Alongside this the recently published report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the 'Digital Music Report 2005', provides an overview of the music industry's digital strategies for the fast-emerging market for online and mobile music distribution. The report indicates that portable players (eg iPod and mobile phones) are transforming the consumer experience of how music is enjoyed, with estimates that 50% of mobile content revenues will be from music. Such figures lead to questions about how such changes will influence the nature of music making and what kinds of interactions and practices will emerge from the everyday use of ubiquitous music devices?


2.1 The thievery corporation

Despite music industry and media hyperbole, the culture of downloading music is still in its infancy. According to the IFPI report less than one in ten people download songs, with the key sector been 16-29 year-olds. The report also states that only one in two people within this population are aware of the existence of legal ways of buying music online. With such facts and figures coming from the industry, their militant international campaign to cut down on music piracy and promote a legal downloading market is not surprising.

Running alongside the model of suing individual users and music pirates is the Creative Commons movement (creativecommons.org), pioneered among others by the eminent lawyer and cyber theorist Professor Lawrence Lessig. Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation which over the last two years has created around a dozen licenses that allow artists to make their work available to others by providing flexible opt-in licensing systems, thus providing musicians with greater control over how their music is released and used. What is interesting about the Creative Commons movement is that it recognises the link between how music is distributed and how it is made. Discussing these issues in a series of articles in The Wire magazine (November 2004), musicians and key members of the music industry, cultural commenters and politicians highlighted how musician's practices have always been involved in thieving and reusing samples from other musicians. Writing on the future of music sampling Thomas Goetz noted that:

"By nature musicians are thieves. every day, millions of music fans thumb their noses at record labels and exploit digital tech for all it's worth, wilfully swapping and - we'll say it - stealing music. In response, the Recording Industry Association of America has deployed an army of lawyers, initiating copyright infringement lawsuit against 5,400 file sharers (and counting) and lobbying Congress to boost penalties against both the scofflaws and the technologies they use." (Goetz 2004, p182).

"Not really. Imagine if book publishers decided they were against public libraries: oh no we don't like this because people can read books without paying for them and it's killing our sales. It's just not true. They might actually lose a tiny percentage, but they actually gain a lot more." (Byrne 2004, p186)