Free for all
Twitter lends another dimension to the 'share and watch it grow' culture.
If you were in the music business, you might say that I came to the Twitter table rather late. While the world stepped up to Twitter at the South by South West conference in 2007, I was somewhere on the wrong side of Orkut trading inconsequential scraps with people not very far from me. Fortunately, the internetworking micro-blogging phenomenon that is Twitter is now a staple in my life and while nine wonderful people (called my followers) await my first Tweet, I not only find myself fascinated by other Tweeters’ random, banal and often profound 140 character postings, but am even more intrigued when the medium is used more constructively by people like Trent Reznor from the Nine Inch Nails (NIN).
Like millions of others worldwide, the NIN web and digital campaign has engaged me ever since the release of their freely distributed album, Ghosts I-IV. The release of the album followed the unprecedented hype that the free download release of Radiohead’s In Rainbows attracted, and while both artistes developed inspiring online and digital strategies, the NIN seem to have found a way to sustain theirs well beyond the hype. And not least because of activities like Trent Reznor’s Tweeting.
On Twitter, Reznor announces contests and winners, apologises for messily organised concerts, shares little details of his personal life and even discusses new NIN applications for the iPhone and BlackBerry. What’s more, he encourages and often responds to the many comments directed at him by random people. Given this, it wouldn’t take much guesswork to deduce that it is this constant interaction that is the reason for success of the NIN digital strategy.
Over the last year and a half, NIN has developed an evolving eco-system of user generated NIN content through its interactive strategy by encouraging people to share, remix and make videos of their music. What this NIN online strategy successfully facilitates then is a naturalised and very relevant form of participatory culture or, as academic/author Henry Jenkins calls it, “convergence culture”, where every consumer is potentially a creator, whose creations can be shared across a multitude of media platforms and networks. The result in the case of NIN being thousands of videos and remixes of their music floating around the Internet, all of which are available to everyone to use as they please.
But as with most media, musical creativity is more often than not restricted by rigid copyright laws. So it helps that artists like Radiohead, NIN and Girl Talk have released their albums under Creative Commons licences, giving us the right to do as we please with their music as long as we don’t commercialise these creations. RCRDLBL.com, a website that offers free and legal music downloads, is just another successful example of this “share it and watch it grow” culture. The website offers music downloads from both established and lesser-known artists, encouraging people to share and use the music that they make available.
The documentary, RiP: Remix Manifesto explores this remix culture and copyright, and it seems to clearly state that what we are witnessing are only early stages. It will be interesting to watch how much traditional copyright can actually control/restrict or for that matter aid this inevitable culture of sharing music and content.