Artist-Entrepreneurship

Introduction To what extent does copyright law encourage the production of music? On the one hand, the Internet features a vast amount of new music, while on the other hand copyright law is practically weakened by piracy. This is a paradoxical situation. Following the rationale of copyrights, a mitigation of the law (due to problems of enforceability) should lead to a decrease in musical output due to lack of incentives and vice versa. This paper analyzes the motivational incentive of copyrights to artists and labels to produce and publish music. Conclusion A sagging copyright (due to piracy) should lead to a decreasing number in music recordings. However, in light of the flourishing supply of new music on the Internet, something in this equation appears to be wrong. Firstly, artists appear not to be influenced significantly by copyrights. The majority of artists would not adjust their musical productivity to copyright alterations. In addition, there is evidence of a cost-of-c...

Introduction At first glance, the reader may wonder what Theodore W. Adorno and Chris Anderson have in common and what that has to do with researching the music industry. On the one hand, a sophisticated German philosopher; a critical theorist of the 20th century; a member of the renowned Frankfurt School and a follower of Karl Marx’s thoughts on capitalism and society. On the other, Chris Anderson, a child of the digital economy, a blog writer, a journalist, a business entrepreneur and, according to The Time 100 , one of the most influential thinkers of the new millennium. Both were (respectively are) critically reflecting the media landscape of their time. In this paper I use the ideas of both thinkers and demonstrate the Mediamorphosis in the wake of technological innovations at the example of the music industry. On the one hand a centralized media system dominated by large media conglomerates, on the other side a democratic media system driven by prosumers. Thes two contrasting m...