Evolution of Technology and Social Relations in the Music Industry

Property Rights and Technology

Old vinyl records had property rights well-defined around the technology.
Copying records to cassettes seemed like it didn't violate any major principles.
Changes in technology destabilized established laws and ideas.

Corporate Crisis and Reinvention

The corporate music industry was losing money, leading to downsizing and layoffs.
Corporations seek to restore balance when threatened.
Phillips Corporation, an earlier disruptive innovator, introduced the compact disc in 1979.
Based on the laser disc technology (1976-77) for video recording, which was expensive and not widely adopted.
CDs recorded sound at a high level of definition, becoming a revelation.
People discarded record collections for CDs, creating a windfall for the music industry.
Cassettes had poor sound quality (noise, hiss), whereas CDs sounded beautiful.
Consumers felt the sound was so great, that paying for the music was worth it.
CDs had to be manufactured in factories, making property rights enforceable.
New technology saved the corporate music industry by creating a market for manufactured discs.

The Advent of the Personal Computer

IBM introduced the desktop computer in 1981.
Early computers were room-sized and required special facilities.
An innovation was the use of compact discs as a storage device.
The Philips Corporation redesigned the compact disc to be both read and write.
Compact discs became a recording device, creating a problem for the recording industry because of duplications.
In 1981, there was no Internet, but CDs could be easily copied.

The Internet and Peer-to-Peer Sharing

By 1994-95, the Internet emerged, exacerbating the duplication problem.
Music could be broadcast over the Internet.
Peer-to-peer file sharing networks allowed direct connections between computers.
CDs could be ripped into computers, creating pure digital signals that could be sent over the Internet.
Sean Fanning created Napster, a company based on peer-to-peer sharing, becoming a billionaire.
Napster was a tragedy for the recorded music industry.
Only one copy of a CD was needed for the entire world when shared online.
Record stores declined and disappeared.

Social Revolution in Music Consumption

The collapse of existing social relations of production due to peer-to-peer sharing is likened to a social revolution, even without violence or barricades.
Technologies evolve, creating certain social relations set up to take advantage of them commercially.
When existing relations fail, they become irrelevant, transforming the superstructure (property rights, norms, beliefs).
With Napster, people no longer saw music as property but as something that should be free.

The Future of Music Distribution

New social relations will form as technologies develop.
If peer-to-peer sharing is dominant, artists and consumers might have direct relationships, bypassing corporate interests.
Questions arise about property rights in this new arrangement.
How do artists make a living without traditional property rights?
Lockean property rights, based on combining labor with raw materials, don't apply to intangible creations like songs.
Intellectual property law is evolving to address ownership of intangible creations.
The "rebel creed" is the idea that audio should be free.
The "rebel creed" conflicts with the idea of artists making money.

The Corporate Response

The corporate recording industry has not disappeared but has evolved.
Napster faced lawsuits and was shut down, merging with a file-sharing service called Rhapsody, adopting a paid model.
Apple introduced iTunes, a store for buying music downloads.
The streaming service model emerged, with monthly fees or ad-supported listening.

Continued Evolution

The corporate recording industry used new technologies and monetary models to capture business (streaming services).
Bandcamp emerged as a streaming service where artists can share their music and set their own fees or ask for donations, cutting out the corporation.
TikTok allows artists to record and share their own music directly.
Society is undergoing a period of social change and revolution, with social relations reforming around new technology.
The political and legal superstructure and social consciousness also take on new forms.

Driving Forces of Social Change

Technologies drive social change.
History is about changes in the material productive forces (evolution of technology).
Political and legal structures, thoughts, and ideas are results of deeper technological changes.
Stages of development in the division of labor determine forms of ownership and relations of individuals to one another with reference to material, instrument, and product.
Forces of production, state of society, and consciousness can come into contradiction with one another.

Competition and Innovation

Economic competition drives technological change.
Companies innovate to gain market share in a competitive situation.
Technological change can be autonomous, driven by the pursuit of profit, even with catastrophic social consequences.
The structure of a competitive economy drives innovation and technical change.
Buyers make decisions about what products they want, and sellers compete with each other for those consumers.
It forces corporations to compete with each other.
Innovation has a premium put on it.

Ethical and Philosophical Implications

This technical change is kind of autonomous. It seems to follow its own logic.
Innovating new stuff that they monetize and outstrip the competition even though it might have catastrophic social consequences.
Nobody is thinking, what I really wanna do is destroy an entire industry and establish a new one in its place with different social relations.
Peer to peer file sharing networks were a disaster for a small part of the economy.
The industrial revolution: just trying to get ahead of the competition.

Summary from the reading "German Ideology"

Forces of production are the material productive forces.
State of society is the social division of labor.
Consciousness is the form of it.

Terms Related To Marx's Social Change:

Forces of production or material productive forces
The relation to production or social division of labor
The forms of consciousness or the consciousness
The technologies are the ultimate basis for the evolution of society

Examples of Marx's Theories

1649: The English executed their king- that was a revolution.
Then when they got rid of his brother in another democratic revolution, you can say that was just a prolonged revolution.
And what you get at the end is John Locke, the father of liberalism. He was just the superstructure.
Kant again comes up with a form of social consciousness and set of Legal Ideas but its still just ideas or results of it.

The Power of Technology

With the talking machine company, they developed the the technology that they thought would be profitable, and it turns out it wasn't. They get 60 years of profit off of this set of inventions, the modifications, and the finance.
Victor topping Machine company was the first in, and they had a patent on technology that they developed.
Philips actually made great records, nice quality, but very hard to get ahead.
And boy do they get a jump on other people every time they figure something out.
And every time you go to one of these technological leaps, you get a momentary kind of monopoly in the industry, and if it's a good leap, if it's a good innovation, you have the market to yourself.

Marx and Ingalls Response

You cannot change technology it is like a train running on its own steam because people keep innovating and repeating and trying to make money and coming up with new stuff that they monetize and outstrip the competition.
What you have to change is essentially the tracks. You have to change the legal structures that make it run.

Human nature

They never talked about human nature and always referred back to changing up technology and making sure that nothing is in the way of that.
Each society is continually building, and so human nature is continually changing and evolving.
We have civil societies that get created to save us from pain but make way for something good.
We want an economic and political structure that is gonna make people happy at the end of the day.
And how do you get to that, social class and all equal systems?
The workers ultimately and always are at a disadvantage because they work, making the other man more money and more power and influence when it really should be for them.