Mediators

Negus touches on a few different topics within the chapter about who mediates music and how this various mediation practices have moved through time starting with the printed form of music and moving into how radio is mediated through corporations. Corporations have used radio to focus on different groups of people as a means of marketing and the stations have broken up into different genres of music for specific groups of so that you are just serve that set through one particular radio station. Negus then discusses the music video and how that has changed, from just simple filmed performances to adding a completely new dimension to music through the visual aspect weather seen as related or unrelated to the song it’s self.

One of the pieces within this chapter that I kept coming back to was how out dated this chapter feels, especially with the current obliquity of the internet and how the internet has lead to the beginnings of music democratization. It is now possible for anyone to listen to any different kind of music any time one would like to. The process is fairly simple through a simple search. Many sites do the searching for the user. The user only has to type in the song. The site will find where the song is housed on the internet, package the song in some kind of player for the song and present that to the user.

This is in complete juxtaposition to the waiting and hoping the radio listener would have to endure to hear the song that they desire to hear. Radio has a predetermined playlist or range of songs that are suitable for that radio station’s target market share. Through the internet, there is no mediation between the listener and the music at this point. The radio model needs to be rethought.

Music is something that is more available to the public than ever before. I think the biggest example of this would be the Napster cases from the late 90’s. This was the first popularized way for people to actively share music. Napster was eventually taken to court and stopped functioning in the original manner that it had. Currently, there are many different kinds of technologies that one could download different kinds of music at the push of a button. Once society has an easy way to get something that produces an emotional response like music, they will continue to find ways to keep getting what was available through different means.

The comment at the end of the chapter describing Blockbuster creating a partnership with IBM to help distribute CDs and the record companies saying that they don’t need any help with that aspect of their business was interesting to me. This is especially timely to all the press recently about Pirate Bay as well as the RIAA case against Jammie Thomas-Rasset for illegally sharing music here in Minnesota. Record companies are continuing to follow their model of distribution even after the distribution system has been shown to be out-dated. They are willing to fight tooth and nail to keep it relevant.