What Do Musicians Talk About When They Talk About Copyright?

Abstract

Based primarily on interviews with musicians who sit on the margins of the music industry and for whom music is not their main source of income, this article reports on how these artists and performers think and talk about copyright. If, as many suppose, the business of making music is more and more about the distribution of rights, how are these rights understood and valued in the practices of these musicians? What are these rights seen to protect and to what end? The article explores these questions by considering how aspiring musicians connect their thoughts about their music and its value to them, to claims made—ostensibly on their behalf—by a copyright regime that is intended to reward their creativity. Their attitudes are often a mixture of the pragmatic and principled, where that pragmatism is not simply linked to money, any more than principle is solely about the musicians’ claims as creators. Information can be more valuable than cash, loyalty to their fellow musicians more prized than the recognition of individual talent. Such views run counter to many of the assumptions that ground copyright, suggesting that, for this group of artists at least, ‘copyright’ assumes a different guise than that conventionally assumed.

Acknowledgments

We owe a debt of thanks to those musicians who agreed to be interviewed for this research and for the referees of this journal for their helpful suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the MeCCSA Conference, University of Bournemouth, January 2016.

Notes

1. The initials of interviewees have been changed to protect their anonymity; all initialed quotations are from interviews.