With the advent of mechanical reproduction of “culture”, i.e. the invention of the printing press, the sense of value of cultural production began to shift. Before printing a book’s worth lay much more in the book’s physical apperance than we are used to now. The workers being payed in the production process were the scriber who copied the book, the illuminator who illustrated it and the bookbinder who bound it. Not necessarily the author. The proto-copyright that evolved wasn’t concerned with the author very much either, but had it’s roots in the old systems of gilds and cencorship then prevalent in Europe: the first real copyright legislation, the british Statute of Anne (1709/10) still gave the London Stationers’ Company a monopoly on printing, on the condition of a registration of each title. This bill refused to adhere to a Lockean notion of property, which was mentioned in the first draft but didn’t pass parliament, and explicitly called on the ‘Encouragement of learned Men to compose and write useful Books’ for justification. More than 200 years after the invention of the printing press authors were still mostly being ‘bought out’ with a one-off payment, much like it was common in last century’s pop music industry.

While books were getting cheaper, the following copyright legislations valued the author higher and higher, leading to a concept of intellectual property and an author’s ‘Natural Right’ on his creation much influenced by German Idealism. Until this day ‘the common good’ and ‘the author’s natural right’ have been the two main justifications for copyright, often being muddled together.[1] I won’t delve into this much deeper now, but I highly recommend the anthology “Music and Copyright” edited by Simon Frith and Lee Marshall to anyone who wants to understand how we got to the messed up state of copyright we have now, and why those concepts aren’t working anymore.

The Birth of Popular Music/What Makes a Hit

When copyright began to be applied to music it was applied to the written score, being the only music medium of that time. But ecclesial ceremonies which had borne notation, and european art music that depended so much on it, of course didn’t have a monopoly on music. Folk/”traditional” music didn’t depend on notation, and kept some of the spontaneity and improvisation necessary to entertain a moody crowd. With the process of industrialization, the resulting explosion of big cities and the ‘homogenisation of large population groups’, as Prof. Wicke puts it, ‘folk music’ became ‘popular music’. Wicke describes the waltz-craze of the 19. Century as one of the first examples of popular music (although being written down), because it mixed the bourgeoisie with the noblesse, and happened in public ballrooms, not at the court of some noble man. Access wasn’t restricted by birth, but by money, and this kind of partying wasn’t confined to a certain occasion. I suggest something similar was happening in cheaper bars for the not so lucky parts of the population.

Music became much more accessible and (omni-) present than it was before. Songs and pieces weren’t written so much for special occasions like birth, marriage and death anymore, but to function in any kind of enviroment, with any instrumentation that was at hand, being it two people at a street corner, a girl on the parlor piano, a small or a big band in a café or a bar, at day or night, for listening or dancing. This was the way pre-recording ‘hits’ worked. The bond that had tied as much everyone to ‘his place’ as music to it’s own and the communities that still gave special occasions their meaning in rural areas lost their impact in the big cities.[2]

1 Kretschmer/Kawohl, The History and Philosophy of Copyright, in: Frith/Marshall (Hrsg.), Music and Copyright, Edinburgh 2004
2 Peter Wicke, http://www2.hu-berlin.de/fpm/texte/pop20jh.htm, read 28.10.2005; Prof. Peter Wicke in the lecture „Geschichte der populären Musik“, held at the Humboldt University in Berlin, SS 2004