Ownership in Digital Culture

Ownership in a Digital Culture
      Many scholars throughout history have theorized about the reason why human beings have an odd passion for possession.  Among them was Jean Baudrillard whose theory of collecting as a marginal system offered a perspective not through an economic lens, as many others have done, rather through a semiotic lens.  The theory defines object and differentiates it from utensil.  An object, Baudrillard says, is a reflex of a passion.  It refers only to itself and has meaning only to the owner of the object.  Possession of objects is a reflex of the greater (and greatest) passion of personal possession.  That passion drives us to collect objects, and once serialized these collections take on meaning beyond themselves and refer to each other.  Collections, in short, are "complex organizations of objects, each which refers to all the others."   These collections give meaning to an individual's life and become part of the owner's identity.  Collections become the individual's reality, and purpose for living.  Completing a collection, acquiring what Baudrillard calls the "unique object," would have the effect of erasing the individual's reality.  The unique object's absence "enables [the owner] merely to rehearse his death (and so exorcise it) by having an object represent it."   He used examples of art collections and interior design to illustrate his point of how humans collect, and how those collections express a passion and carry meaning with them for the owner.  In many ways this theory works to explain why the collection of physical objects maintain meaning and possession of those objects alone shape the owner's identity.  It explains the seemingly ordinary passion of human possession; the things we own, to borrow language from novelist Chuck Palahniuk, end up owning us.  If ownership and possession are synonymous, that an object cannot be truly possessed unless it is legitimately owned, this theory seems only to apply to analog objects, that is, those objects that have tangible properties, as opposed to digital objects, which exist only as they are encoded onto another object.  The tensions that digitized objects present to Baurdillard's theory are many and varied, and are identifiable through close examination of the digital music phenomenon that started in the 1990's.
    In the late 20th century advances in recording technologies met advances in communication technologies and produced an unprecedented shift in the way humans could produce, distribute and access music.  With those changes came a change in the meaning humans gave to the music they possess.  No longer could a person purchase an album and leave it in its shrink-wrap to keep it in pristine condition.  With digital music and all the technological innovation that came with it, a person can carry, playback and redistribute their entire collection on a single disc.  The songs themselves still carry the same meaning for many people, but the collection's meaning remains undetermined.  Baudrillard had no concept of digital (at least not one that would account for the digital proliferation since the late 1990s) and therefore the question remaining is what to do with ownership of digital objects.
Analog and Digital Objects
    The analysis of Baudrillard's theory must begin by distinguishing between analog and digital objects.  Analog objects exist substantially; they can be touched, destroyed, and manipulated in their purest form of existence.  A collection of six hundred albums, for example, collected on compact disc will take up a roughly five-foot tall, two-and-a-half-foot wide cabinet.  The consumer can serialize those discs in a specific fashion and that arrangement will add to the meaning of the collection taken as a whole.  Those albums are also destructive, and interactive.  Not only can a consumer place the CD into a computer or CD player to plack back the music encoded onto it, the jewel case can be opened and the consumer can page through the liner notes.  The producer can modify the jewel case to make it unique.  The musician Beck, for example, recently added a collection of stickers to his album The Information.  The album art was a simple graph paper pattern and the consumer could design their own album artwork using the included stickers as an aide.  
      Analog objects have destructive utility; they are material and thus will deteriorate.  In the case of music, the album artwork might deteriorate.  In the days of tapes and records, the groove on a record modified with each play, particularly good albums for a consumer would wear down so much that they became unplayable.  CD's are more difficult to destroy, through ordinary use, the audio quality of a CD will remain exactly the same, but the CD still possesses a destructive quality because a scratch on the surface can still adversely affect playback.
      Analog music objects are those objects where the audio is a product of the object's utility.  That is, when the object becomes a utensil and refers the owner to the world, it produces audio.  Where the product of a refrigerator's utility is the chilling of whatever is locked inside, the product of a record's utility is music.  The first device that could record audio for playback was Thomas Edison's cylinder phonograph.  (The phonautograph was the first device to record sound.  It recorded sound onto a piece of paper but could not be replayed.  French inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville created the first audio recording some seventeen years earlier in 1860, of someone singing "Au Clair de la Lune" and was recently replayed by researchers at Stanford University.  The inventor never intended the audio to be replayed, only recorded.  Source: National Public Radio/npr.org)  The Compact Disc made its debut in the early 1980's and for the first time a piece of music could replayed an infinite number of times and never lose its quality.  The disc could hold nearly an hour and twenty minutes of continuous audio, and "like the grooves on a record, CDs are engraved with a spiral of tiny pits."   A laser scans those pits and a computer encodes the reflected light as 1's and 0's and translates the digital signal into sound.
    The compact disc marked the beginning of a new revolution; it was an apocalyptic moment ending the analog age, revealing a new digital world order.  Since the 1980's, digital audio techniques allowed artists to record high quality audio onto seemingly permanent media.  Gone were the days of reel-to-reel analog audio recording on destructive media, replaced in favor of digital audio that could be mixed together non-destructively without losing either the quality or the substance of the original audio.  A three and a half inch hard disc replaced the storerooms once used to house volumes of reels of magnetic tape.  Four years after the first compact disc appeared on shelves, the CD player was outselling record players, and in just six years, the CDs were outselling records.
    The upshot of the CD was that consumers could copy and back up their albums onto the hard disc of their personal computer through a process called "space shifting".  As a result, the audio, encoded onto the disc, was transferable onto the personal computer of every consumer who bought it.  The process, like nearly every other technological advance in the media, raised issues of music piracy.  If the consumer had the audio files from the CD on its computer, it could easily create a new copy of that CD and for the first time quickly redistribute the music at low cost.  The popularization of the Internet in the late 1990's only grew the phenomenon of music piracy.  Now digital files, including audio could be sent to anyone in the world at low cost.  As Internet technology grew faster and more user-friendly so did file sharing.  Thanks to the personal computer and the Internet, the audio of the music became separate from the physical material of the object.  In short, it became fully digital.
    The root of the word digital is digit and describes a phenomenon where binary digits signify real information for a computer to decode and make human-readable.  Even the earliest computer symbolized and translated information with 1's and 0's.  These computers required a user to feed punch cards into the machine and printed out strings of information.  A punch on the card represented a 1 and the absence of a punch a 0.  The computer then ran a program to translate the 1's and 0's into information.  Modern computers rely on a similar, albeit more sophisticated, process: translating the arrangement of ferromagnetic particles into 1's and 0's with programs to translate those data into useful information.  The digital object then, is nothing without the helping application.  A piece of music does not exist on the hard disc.  What exists is a file symbolized and translated from a string of digits into music.  This phenomenally sophisticated process, when contrasted with analog objects, produces some incredible implications for music collecting.
The Recorded Sound
    Recording music for consumption is a relatively new phenomenon.  Before the late nineteenth century it was impossible to record audio and replay a performance.  Humans experienced music in one way: through live performance.  Music was elitist, high art reserved for those who could afford to attend a performance; the record began democratizing music, making it accessible to virtually anyone.  It also allowed for the globalization of music.  For example, it is true that people in the United States knew of German composer Richard Wagner but could not listen to the Ring Cycle unless they attended a show.  The recording industry created itself to control the distribution of recorded sounds and eventually trade organizations, like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), spawned to ensure that the elect few represented by those companies were the only ones who could produce and distribute music.  In sum, the music business created itself to protect the artist against the actions of its fans.
Sound is, biologically, an intensely tangible sensation; in an interview with National Public Radio, Psychologist Anne Fernald describes it as "touch at a distance."  Sound is not about something; it is a biological sensation that "feels...more like touch."   This turns out to be an oddly accurate statement.  Rapid vibrations in air pressure move toward an individual's ear.  The human ear is able to translate these waves of vibrating air, by channeling them into a small tunnel which irritates the eardrum and vibrates a few tiny bones.  The vibration of those bones transmits a signal through a sea of fluid filled with hair cells that literally bend with the waves and send electricity to the brain.  This is the biological process hearing sound but not of making sense of sound.   The human brain takes over to make sense of the sounds in the auditory cortex.  The process of making sense and identifying sounds is, in other words, an intensely personal experience.  This is why the music one person finds excruciatingly painful, another person may find beautiful.  In many ways, recorded audio attempts to mimic this process.
     In 1877, Thomas Edison invented a device called the phonograph that captured sound through a cone that caused a needle to indent the surface of a metal cylinder wrapped in tin foil in a vertical groove pattern.    This technology inspired audio recording through much of the twentieth century.  As recording technology advanced, it allowed for the capturing of more audio at better quality but the recording process was always a physical representation of the sound wave.  Then, 205 years later, the recording industry changed dramatically as "row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany."   The CD introduced digital sound and in doing so revolutionized the music production process.
    Digital audio recording works by a computer sampling an input device for sound, several thousand times per second.  The software first asks the soundcard for information, and then translates that information into digital audio data.  The human ear experiences audio instantaneously, that is to say it has a nearly infinite sampling rate, and as computer technology processing technology has become nearly instant, the quality of the recorded sounds improves.  CD quality audio records at a rate of 44,100 samples per second, or 44.1 kilohertz (kHz) and is limited to that specification even though digital recording generally is not so limited.  The limitations placed on digital audio are in file size.  Since file size increases with recording quality, digital audio needs compression that closely resembles the original recording.  
      In the early 1990's the mp3 was born.  The mp3 is an audio compression format that compresses the large raw audio files by removing some of the audio; the mp3 compression removes high frequency ranges that are nearly if not completely inaudible to the human ear making the resulting file smaller while keeping most of the audio.  The mp3 format quickly rose to popularity because it allowed mass storage of hundreds of songs on one disc.  Its popularity, combined with the rising popularity of the Internet, led to the creation of mp3 players and eventually, mp3.com, the first website designated for mp3 distribution, which spawned and inspired a diverse array of music oriented Internet communities.  Myspace.com quickly rose as a popular distributor of music, and is quickly becoming more important than radio stations for music promotion.  The British Last.fm is another popular Internet community where fans link together to chart the music they play and share tastes with each other.
The Internet Problem
      The Internet's global scope allows artists to reach audiences that were previously unreachable, at little to no cost.  The problem of anonymity on the Internet offset the speed and inexpensiveness of the Internet for many recording companies.  There is no way of verifying the identity of the users creating accounts to distribute music on sites like myspace.com, the major implication being that the original author was not necessarily the primary distributor.  Any person could distribute anything they wanted on these websites and services like Napster emerged allowing any person to make their entire collection freely available to any other user on the Internet.  Since 2001 artists and the industry supporting their business, have struggled with Internet distribution of digital audio. Selling the albums online as digital music was too risky and the business model the recording industry relied upon throughout most of the twentieth century was no longer working.  If one person paid for and downloaded the files they could set up a website where everyone else on the web could download them free of charge.  The industry needed to stay afloat but saw album sales begin to dwindle in the early 2000s and chose the path of least resistance to solve the problem: they filed lawsuits.
      Since Lars Ulrich of the band Metallica and rapper Dr. Dre filed the first lawsuit recording industry has by and large taken a bandage approach to fixing the Internet problem: find as many people who are sharing music as possible and try to shut them down.  The problem with this approach for the industry was that the file sharing phenomenon became so widespread that trying to shutdown every sharer is a never-ending battle, and the file sharing methods, like everything else relating to computers, were (and still are) constantly changing and becoming more sophisticated.  Complicating the situation even further, open source software, and other distributors, use this same service to freely distribute their content.
The people who are mostly engaged in illegal music sharing today are the people who were in middle and high school when the Internet took off.  Peter Ferdinand in his book, The Internet, Democracy and Democratization, writes: "The greatest impact of the Internet...has been upon business and commerce."  Andrew Sparrow expands on the business of the Internet specifically related to the music industry in their book Music Distribution and the Internet: A Legal Guide to the Music Business.  According to Sparrow most people in the mid-1990s did not know how to use the Internet for commercial purposes, they were unsure about the security of sending a credit card through the ether to mail order anything, including music.   Throughout the Internet's birth then, consumers could freely access music without releasing any private information, but purchasing that music required sending the consumer's real name, address, and credit card number through an insecure and mysterious medium.  Whereas consumers participated in a transaction at record stores, in "ecommerce," it had no idea where its private information was going, or even if the website offering the product was legitimate.   It should be no surprise that the consumer chose the former over the latter.
      The Internet allows a consumer to listen to a wide array of music from nearly every corner of the world.  It also allows musicians to distribute a wide array of music to nearly every corner of the world.  In the case of music business, the musicians are not always the distributors of their own content.  The distributors are not necessarily looking to find and develop a fan base, they are looking for consumers to buy albums, and the Internet has not delivered on the latter promise.  Apple introduced the iTunes Music Store (now the iTunes Store) in 2003 and quickly became the most popular source for legitimate music downloading.  Its prices were low and the quality of audio was at least CD quality.  In spite of the popularity of the store, the recording industry did not slow its efforts to curb the file sharing movement.  The problem for many consumers with services like iTunes is that the songs are protected by something called Digital Rights Management (DRM) software, which essentially protects the artist from its fans by limiting what the consumer can do with the music.  It restricts the consumer's ability to burn, transfer and reproduce the songs as well as the devices and software the consumer can use to play the files.  Until now, this has been the only preventative measure taken by the recording industry in curbing so-called piracy.  According to a 2007 Time Magazine article on the subject, the problem with DRM technology is essentially that it treats a legitimate consumer like a criminal.  The consumer rightfully purchased the audio, and the distributor places restrictions on what the consumer may do with its purchase.  DRM could disappear, "when the music industry will stop assuming its customers are all criminals," and when that happens, the music industry might see album sales rise.
      To be sure there are some who believe, and the music industry is certainly of this mindset, that people are naturally criminals and steal music on the Internet simply because they think they can get away with it.  It therefore follows that the only way to increase album sales is to convince people they cannot.  While that argument is valid, and fits to explain the problem, it oversimplifies the Internet problem.  The problem lies in the perception of music as a commodity.  The recording industry has taken a myopic approach to mitigating so-called "piracy" with legitimate business that lacks creativity and true exploitation of the potentials of Internet technology.  The consumer has a different notion of what it means to possess music, and has different standards for when to purchase music, and when to download it.  The industry needs to realize that when a consumer downloads music they are doing so because they want to hear that artist's music, and begin thinking of downloading not as the loss of a sale, or even theft, rather as a new moment to gain a potential fan for the artist.  
      A parallel can be drawn to address the contention that people are stealing music from the Internet simply because they can get away with it more directly.  New York in the 1980s experienced what Malcolm Gladwell calls a "crime epidemic."  Seemingly ordinary people were engaging in criminal activity every day ranging from petty crimes like jumping subway turnstiles to extremes like murder.  Gladwell sought to understand and diagnose this problem in his book The Tipping Point and he noticed a semantic probem with calling the crime wave an "epidemic" in his words:

      "To say someone is a criminal is to say that he or she is evil or violent or dangerous or dishonest or unstable or any combination of any of those things-none of which is a psychological state that would seem to be transmitterd, casually, form one person to another."

People who are not criminals, in other words, do not suddenly become criminals.  For the same reasons that ordinary New York citizens did not think of themselves as criminals for jumping the subway turnstile in the 1980s, music consumers in the 2000s, downloading music at their convenience, do not think of themselves as criminals.  Thus, to say people are stealing because they think they can get away with it may be true for a small segment of the population-those who are actually criminals-but for the rest of the population, it is an easy and superficial answer to a complex problem deeply rooted in the digital culture.
Democratization of Art
      In 2001, just after the initial piracy wars began raging, Reprise Records unexpectedly dropped the band Wilco, headed by Jeff Tweedy, just as the band was about to release its album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and begin touring to promote it.  In response, the band released the entire album free of charge on the Internet.  The album streamed from their website, and according to Tweedy, "the resulting concerts were a huge success," in a New York Public Library discussion titled "Who Owns Culture?" he "remembered watching in wonder as fans sang along with music that did not exist in CD form."  Tweedy also made "sapient pronouncements on the theoretical underpinnings of ownership," while his co-host, a famous intellectual property lawyer and activist Lawrence Lessig, discussed the need for a sea change in the way the ownership of culture, particularly music, is discussed.   Lessig said the conversation should not be driven by "lawyers, lobbyists...and 'Lessigs,'" it should be driven by artists.
    Lessig uses "artist" in the broad sense of the word.  He pointed to phenomena like DJ Dangermouse's "Grey Album" a remix of Hip-Hop legend Jay-Z's Black Album and rock legends The Beatle's White Album to define artist.  Artists are not just the people represented by the Recording Industry Association of America in court, in fact, the flexibility and power of the digital commodity culture allows anyone to be an artist.  Digital culture is democratizing art.  Take for example the website youtube.com.  YouTube is a community of artists who produce and distribute their videos for free on the Internet.  YouTube allows anyone with a video camera and simple (and sometimes free) video editing tools to upload a video to the world, and none of these artists are asking for money for their work.  YouTube user liamkylesullivan, became successful beyond the popularity of his videos, and landed a spot opening for Margaret Cho on her 2008 comedy tour.  His Kids in the Hall inspired character "Kelly" is a teenager who satirizes the shallow lives of high school students by presenting a character more concerned about buying shoes than her alcoholic grandmother, culturally insensitive brother, and ethnocentric and generally oblivious parents.  
      A similar example of this in the music industry appeared in the summer of 2007 when the hip hop artist Soulja Boy climbed the Billboard charts and landed a record contract with Interscope records.  Soulja Boy started his career with a few mp3s uploaded to the website myspace.com and other sites that allow comments and critiques of music and eventually started his own website.  He did it all from his father's computer.  That same year, industrial rock pioneer Trent Reznor and his band Nine Inch Nails launched the website remix.nin.com.  Reznor had previously offered select tracks off the band's 1994 release The Fragile for fans to remix.  Reznor made a similar offer in 2003, initially offering "The Hand That Feeds," and later two other tracks from the album With Teeth, and this time included a submission process where fans could send their remix back to Reznor and listened to by fans.  In the summer of 2007 Nine Inch Nails released Year Zero and Reznor offered a multi-track download of every track and this time created a full dedicated website for fans to upload their remixes, and listen to and rate other remixes.  Reznor compiled some of the remixes on an EP called Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D (pronounced "Year Zero Remixed").  Nine Inch Nails demonstrated with Year Zero the power of artist centric distribution of culture, treating art as a part of culture and not a business. Reznor took this one step further after it dropped its record label (the opposite of Wilco) in 2008 first releasing a concept album called Ghosts I-IV, in which every track was improvisational, and later with its album The Slip.  Both albums were self-released by Nine Inch Nails under a label called "The Null Corporation", a vanity label run entirely by Nine Inch Nails, and were "sold" at least partially for free by the band and released under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.  (Ghosts I-IV was released as a four-volume set, volume 1—Ghosts I—was released for free and volumes II-IV were available for $5.)  The license allows the consumer to contribute its recreation of the music to the artistic community so long as they attribute Nine Inch Nails, distribute their work under the same license, and agree not to sell their content commercially.
    With all of this in mind, Baudrillard's theory of collecting needs some revision.  His original theory was formed around the idea of a commodity culture, and he intentionally focused his theory at art.  With the disappearance of the CD, the digital object may not possess the intrinsic meaning that an analog object would.  Consumers ascribe a particular meaning to the files on their hard disc.  In the days of LPs, EPs, Cassettes, 8-tracks, and eventually CDs-analog formats-possession of music was in and of itself a meaningful process.  In the digital age, possessing the album may still be meaningful, but more meaningful is how the consumer chooses to experience the album.  The technology that created the recording industry is in the process of destroying it.  Music can no longer be owned, it once again may only be experienced.  Artists no longer need the radio and MTV to become phenomenal stars; they only need a modern computer, an Internet connection, and a free Myspace.com account to achieve the same goals the record companies achieved years ago.
      The digital audio revolution, like the analog revolution, democratized the music industry.  Music has once again broken down the elitist barriers separating artists from consumers.  In the absence of CDs, the consumer will need to find a way to experience the digital object in a unique way.  Artists like Wilco, Nine Inch Nails and others who are willing to accept these implications and are willing to create art and contribute to an artistic community are the future of music, and the full utilization of great technology.  Pitchforkmedia.com said "Reznor...called into question the major-label reserve clause for established, profitable musicians by not just coming up with a new way to monetize music, but just giving it away for free, no strings attached.  Instead of 'tip-jar,' it's 'this one's on me.'"  Reznor, like Wilco, packaged his music with a mechanism for personal ownership.
      In Reznor's case, the ownership came not only from the totally free download, but also from the multi-track download and full license to remix and recreate his music.  He then gave his fans a community in remix.nin.com to perpetuate the artistic community his music spawned.  Reznor is certainly learning from Jeff Tweedy's ideas regarding the ownership of culture, that ownership is music is not something that can be owned: "The Internet...exists, we can't beat it so we might as well embrace it.... "  He says artists should "put their politics where their mouth is.  Once you create something," Tweedy says, "it doesn't exist except in the consciousness of listener...that's where it is finished."  He says that the audience has a 50% investment in the music an artist creates and forcing people to pay for it is ludicrous.    The listener already owns the music the minute they hear it, whether they have paid for it or not.
Creating Community and Making Meaning
      Some might say that only those artists who have "made it big" can participate in this artistic community; that Nine Inch Nails and Wilco can "afford" to give away their music because they have already made so much money on past album sales.  It should be noted however, that while Nine Inch Nails is an 18 year old group with twenty-some releases and several world tours that helped get them where they are now, there are many other examples of artists using this technology.  The Minneapolis hip-hop group Atmosphere utilized its strong and loyal fanbase to promote the band and its 2008 release by releasing a full album, Strictly Leakage, for free on their website in December of 2008.  Its 2008 release, and the group's fifth full-length studio album, reached Billboard's top 10 and sold over 36,000 copies in its first week.  The band has since been a featured artist on mtv.com and has so far sold out their entire west coast tour.  This is both the group's and its independent record label Rhymesayers Entertainment's first album to ever land on Billboard's Top 200, let alone the Top 10.  The group barely known outside of Minneapolis and parts of Southern California saw a rapid explosion of their fanbase starting with their 2008 release.  It is a stretch to pin this success solely on the Strictly Leakage release, but the artist's Christmas gift certainly strengthened Atmosphere's fan base.  As did the ensuing web promotions on their website, (cross-posted to their Myspace and Facebook fan pages and hundreds of other websites) and other clever promotional strategies that took advantage of the Internet.  (The album, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold was promoted by mailing copies of a promotional package to blogs packaged with lemons—which would rot by the time they arrived at the blog—painted gold.  The band received instant (and worldwide) publicity for their stunt.  Here's one example: http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/ctrl-v/2008/04/when-life-sends-you-moldy-lemons.html)  Minnesota's local music community exemplifies many similar instances of rapid rises in popularity.  Minneapolis' Tapes 'n Tapes gained national presence around the release of their 2006 release The Loon: appearing on the Late Show with Dave Letterman just days before opening for another local group The Plastic Constellations.  The sea change in Tapes 'n Tapes' popularity came from Pitchforkmedia.com and their review of The Loon.  According to a June 2006 City Pages article, "Tapes 'n Tapes had self-released The Loon at the time it was reviewed but had no outlet for national distribution.  Being stamped with the site's prestigious 'Best New Music' tag and a rating of 8.3 left the band scrambling to fill online orders."  The owner of Minneapolis record store The Electric Fetus said that Pitchfork has been massively successful in setting the stage for what bands he would stock.  The band's success, as City Pages acknowledges, cannot rest solely on their Pitchfork review, their success in networking with bands and fans on the social networking site Myspace and "mp3 blogs" in other realms of the Internet are what put them on Pitchfork's radar.  These examples though, do not address the root of music's digital problem: the notion of ownership.
      Ownership was the crux of Baudrillard's theory of collecting: it was the ultimate human passion and could only be satisfied through possession and accumulation of objects.  Digital objects are objects; this paper would not call them objects if they were not.  In music, the owner gives the files meaning by listening to it.  As Jeff Tweedy says music creation is a 50% investment by the artist, the listener creates the other 50%.  The consumer owns the music because it exists in a unique way in the consciousness of the consumer.  Digital music is collectible; it possesses meaning, and can even be manipulated, sampled, and recreated into entirely different objects without destroying the original audio.  The same ability that the original producer has to create the music, the consumer has to recreate the music.
      Digital audio allows consumers to be truly and fully in control of their music and art is no longer an elitist trade.  Anyone and everyone is an artist and everyone has an accessible means of distributing their art to anyone else.  The examples used to defend this argument are some of the most identifiable examples of artists using the Internet to distribute and promote their work.  That creative community exists on the Internet, not only in sites like Myspace, Pitchfork, and YouTube, but also in a place called the creative commons.  The creative commons is a legal license that lets musicians, authors, and other artists "change their copyright terms from 'All Rights Reserved' to  'Some Rights Reserved.'"  A Creative Commons licensed musician allows other people to build off their work in a community of similarly licensed musicians, video producers, and other artists.  When Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I-IV, The Slip and their accompanying multi-track files they put their listeners in control of the music.  Nine Inch Nails takes the creative commons practice a step further than Wilco or Atmosphere by letting people remix the actual recorded instruments tracks.  It is worth noting that as the Internet rises even further in popularity and consumers' ability to work with multi-track audio files increases and becomes more accessible, this may be the future of music production.  Technology may allow music to finally transcend every boundary of elitism by allowing any curious listener to create new music.
Paper or Plastic?
    Listening to music was never a legal issue before the record; it was never a crime to produce music.  Instead, it was a privilege, something reserved for the elite of society.  Suddenly the record made it possible for anyone with a guitar to record and distribute, en masse, a piece of music.  Then the recording industry appeared to ensure that music would once again be reserved for an elite class.  It was now acceptable for ordinary people to listen to music and produce music; only those who had true talent, that the record companies identified as qualified for mass distribution were allowed to be artists.  The ordinary person belonged to a class beneath the likes of the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Michael Jackson.  The recording industry treated music like plastic, a commodity that was traded on a market like any other widget in the economy.  Suddenly music was again elitist and the 1990's challenged that elitism.  The Internet, like so many other industries, democratized the music industry, and challenged the idea that music was plastic, that music was something owned by the producer, and not the listener.  The person identified by artist suddenly became a much wider range of individuals and suddenly music was no longer plastic.  The conflict the recording industry is now fighting with its consumers is a conflict between music as an experience and music as plastic.
    The recording industry wants to treat music production as if music is plastic.  At one dollar per song, the industry would like its consumers to believe that it is still the only organization that can produce music, and the only organization that can own that piece of culture while the Internet constantly proves it wrong.  The music industry is failing to see that music is only a commodity because it has made it one.  The music industry is a self-made industry, and it is slipping away.  The Internet does not require twenty-plus member crews to produce an hour and twenty-minute album, but the recording industry does.  The recording industry requires every artist to have an entire entourage of mangers, marketers, sound engineers, producers and other layers of additional, unnecessary, support staff.  Each album sale pays each of these people to promote, produce, and protect the commodity of the artist's recording, and the recording industry is not hiding this.  The RIAA openly acknowledges that the bureaucracy of the music industry benefits from each album sale, and the success of the artist.  The American Society of Composers Artists and Performers (ASCAP), another organization designed to protect the integrity of the industry, proclaims on its website that the artists-the composers, artists, and performers they represent-only earn 1.74 cents per minute of recorded music, or about 9.1 cents per song.  According to ASCAP "if 10 songs were included on a CD and each received a 9.1¢ royalty, a total of 91¢ in mechanical royalties would be generated from the sale of each album."   The recording industry is not treating music as art; it is treating music as plastic.
The industry separates the artist from the music, to add as many layers of extra promotional, distribution and production "necessities" to the album as possible while, groups like Nine Inch Nails, Wilco, Atmosphere, and Tapes 'n Tapes will continue self producing their albums and making music that is truly their own.  Tapes 'n Tapes' latest album Walk it Off, had four credits outside of the members of the group: two recording artists, the recording studio and the album artist.  A crew of seven, six of whom were musicians, produced atmosphere's latest chart topping release.  Compare that with recording industry backed Kanye West's latest album Graduation which credits over thirty individuals for nineteen different components of the album including credits for, among others, computer composite directors, "business affairs," and marketing.  Groups that learn how to use the Internet to their advantage, and understand that no one person can absolutely own any piece of culture are the wave of the future of music.  These artists know that they do not need an Artist and Repertoire "A&R" Representative to put a face to their band, or a marketing team to spin their album to radio stations and high profile music magazines like Rolling Stone to give their 4.5 star approval.  They know they do not need a team of professional sound engineers to mix and produce their album, or a special wardrobe to go with their sound.  These groups know that the only thing they need is a recording studio, a Myspace account, and talent to build a fanbase that will support them nearly unconditionally.  In short, these groups know that the music they produce is theirs and they are producing it to entertain and enlighten other people.  They are treating music as an experience, and for that reason are truly artists.

Sources:
  Baurdillard, Jean "A Marginal System: Collecting" from Readings in Contemporary Rhetoric Foss, Karen A., Sonja K. Foss and Robert Trapp eds. p. 260
  ibid
  "CD Celebrates 25th Anniversary."  Associated Press. CNN 17 August 2007.  http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/08/17/cd.anniversary.ap/index.html
  "Musical Language" Radio Lab Abumrad, Jad and Robert Krulwich. National Public Radio WNYC New York City, NY. 21 April 2006
  ibid.
  Library of Congress. Inventing Entertainment: The Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies. "The History of the Edison Cylinder Phonograph" http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edcyldr.html
  "Compact Disc Turns 25" Sterling, Toby.  Associated Press.   MSNBC.  August 16, 2007. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20303440/
  Sparrow, Andrew Music Distribution and the Internet: A Legal Guide for the Music Business.  2006. Gower Technical Press p. 1
  ibid.
  "The Battle Over Music Piracy" Grossman, Lev. Time Magazine.  24 May 2007.  Accessed 20 May 2008 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1625209,00.html
  Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point 2002 Little, Brown and Company.  New York
  Carr, David.  "Exploring the Right to Share, Mix and Burn" New York Times 9April 2006.  Accessed 20 May 2008.   http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/arts/music/09nypl.html?ei=5090&en=7a6d2e24e7faf2eb&ex=1270699200&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&adxnnlx=1210436174-6htetN1l3XSK06Exk1/vcA
  "Who Owns Culture" http://www.wilcoworld.net/wired/media/04_discussion.mp3
  American Society of Composers Artists and Performers (ASCAP) http://www.ascap.com/musicbiz/money-mechanicals.html

Note:
Some of the parentheticals were converted to intext from footnotes; quotations in the article refer to the sources listed above.