A friend recently asked me how as DJs we deal with the whole "record industry copyright" thing and avoid being sued all the time for playing music and putting mixes up on the internet.
I really wasn't sure until I thought about it a bit and realized what I think happened to music in the 20th century. How music creation was so different before recording, and how it is now changing yet again with the rise of the "internet DJ"
Before recording there were composers and performers. The only way to hear music was to go to a performance and hear it live. Famous composers would "record" sheet music, but even then each performance of that music was a little different.
Enter music recording. Here was a way to capture a performance and play it back, but it required technology and it had limited distribution channels. But people loved it. But this way to distribute music was very expensive and controllable. Vinyl records and CDs were expensive to manufacture (need to build machines to do it). And radio and television broadcast was limited: very few stations got on the airwaves and expensive to build broadcast facilities. But it was cheap for people to buy record players and radios. With this limited (and expensive) means of distribution and cheap means of consumption, the record industry was born.
But because of this ability (byproduct?) of how to distribute music, it became hard for musicians to "perform" on that medium (radio, tv, vinyl record, cd). Of course there was always the live house, jazz club, and live performance. But if an artist wanted into the radio/vinyl/cd market with that very large audience, they had to sign with one of the few record companies and join the recording industry. And thus began the strangle hold of the recording industry which led to copyright laws, pirating, and law suites.
But there was always underground music and small record labels.
The vinyl record DJ also had their underground market. Many small record labels and artists doing small pressings of vinyl for the DJ/dance music scene. Because of the nature of DJing (play other people's music at a dance club), the whole scene was about sharing music, so the concept of copyright was quite relaxed. There was no point to restrict the play of DJ tracks. DJs bought records to play them live in a dance club.
Now enter the internet, a new channel to distribute music. Nearly impossible to control: too many channels, too easy for a new distribution channel (website) to pop up. But old record companies want to keep their power. So they go crazy with copyright laws. Internet radio is basically killed. But really that only applied to tracks that were released by the big record companies, sold on CD in record stores and played on the radio stations.
But the DJ and dance music scene were already embracing the concept of music sharing. Playing a DJ set is about performing other people's music. That is the point. So the DJ community embraced internet sharing of music much more than any other music genre.
Enter the internet DJ and desktop music production. The line between DJ and producer is blurred. We follow the DJ underground record label model (basically music sharing is good), we make our own tracks, we remix other DJs tracks, we have our own record labels, we play and share music, and we get to perform for reasonably big crowds at the dance clubs. We try to make a little money at this either through selling our music on internet sites like iTunes, beatport, wasabeat or through our DJ performances. But we also give some of our music away for free on websites like soundcloud and mixcloud.
But mainly we do it because we love music.
