Blought #33: DMCA vs Music Pt. 2

In part 1 of this piece I explored my legal understanding of the DMCA and what it means for the music business. The concerns of piracy and illegal distribution of content has led to the increasingly strong push for digital only music. Streaming also seems to be the industry’s fix a flat approach to curbing piracy.

Personally I believe this is a bit of a twist-arm approach. On one hand subscribers have access to millions of songs by countless artist. On the other hand not all content is available through all services. For example Jay-Z’s debut album Reasonable Doubt is not available on Spotify.

The streaming industry is enjoying exponential growth as competition increases. Companies like Pandora and Spotify have been joined by Apple Music and Tidal as the newest horses to the race.

Blought #32: DMCA vs Music Pt. 1

When Kanye West announced the release of his latest album The Life of Pablo I was ecstatic. Sadly it came with a rather large asterisk. Not only did Yeezy announce that the album would be released exclusively in digital format, but that he was also only releasing it through Tidal. Thankfully the album was made available on Spotify but I’m still not able to complete my collection of Kanye’s physical albums.

Of course this issue is bigger than Kanye. After a bit of digging I’ve drawn the conclusion that the music baseness is moving away from physical music releases. This past spring over 400 musicians, mangers and labels signed a petition urging congress to make changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA.

The DMCA was unanimously passed by congress before being signed into law in 1998 by President Bill Clinton. At the time the internet as we know it was still in its infancy.  The DMCA was created as a provision to protect an artist’s work from being illegally distributed on the internet.