The Medium is the Message

This blog post is for the lecture on November 7^th, 2018.

For this lecture we came to class having watched the video “The Amen Break.” I must say, the first time hearing the drum beat I IMMEDIATELY linked it to that darn car commercial that they play about that Toyota dealership in Springfield. Then, sure enough, they played a Toyota commercial toward the end of the song. Anyway, continuing on to the analysis:

This video is stressing the importance that this six second drum loop had on the music and advertising industry since it was so widely used in hip hop and Toyota ads. My thoughts on loops and the ability to copy and paste music will probably become clearer as I traverse the jungle that is almost guaranteed to be GarageBand, however until then I hold kind of a middle ground. The importance of having readily available song bits to be used in order to create music is not lost on me. However, I don’t know how much the people get paid for creating these bits and if the use of their music without any mention of their name or the work they put into is seems a little wrong to me. Sure, whatever they were paid they accepted knowing that it would be a one-time payment for their anonymity, but maybe they just didn’t know any better. I’m worried that as these loops become more important that we’ll lose the future of fantastic music to the industry of “one-time” hit the drums and quit.

I want to further elaborate on the last lecture, we talked about how these pieces of music can become part of a person’s memory and thus they own the music just as much as the person who made it. No offense, but I disagree entirely. While I fondly remember the Shania Twain album I had as a kid, I do not feel any claim to the music that she provided my childhood. The best example I have is that I also fondly remember Disney World, and if I owned claim to that I wouldn’t be in this class because a degree would be entirely unnecessary. Or maybe a more relevant, less drastic, example: just because I remember playing with toys from cartoon characters, it does not mean I own the cartoon from which the toys came. I have a feeling that the ownership of music is taken much more lightly than the ownership of literally every other form of media. Maybe it’s due to the length of enjoyment being shortened to three minutes or the fact that one artist can put out five albums in the time one movie could be made. The exact reason I am unsure of, but either way, the music industry is no different than the movie industry and my enjoyment of its plunders does not make the hard work and effort put into the pieces a monetary reward I now get to claim. Their hard work is theirs and I have to work equally as hard to make my claim on what I do.