Remix as Cultural Repertoire Expansion
I’m often asked to provide a business justification for pursuing the tools and rights frameworks to enable remix culture. I have various stock answers for this, usually focusing on the potential for improved search or cheaper ways of achieving mass customization of media. This evening, while reading the introduction to David Hesmondhalgh’s The Cultural Industries, I came across another concept that I think gets at why media companies ought to embrace the remixing of their content. Hesmondhalgh, citing Garnham, points out that the media and entertainment industry is very high risk. To manage that risk, media companies attempt to build a diverse “cultural repertoire” or range of cultural products. Any given single production is likely to fail, but given a broad catalog of productions, at least one is likely to hit it big.
Allowing and encouraging remix is a way that media companies can expand their cultural repertoires not just at the level of individual works, but also at the level of the possible expressions of those works. Any given single production is likely to fail, but given a broad set of variants of that production, at least one is likely to hit it big. Electronic music producers caught on to this a long time ago–witness the number of remixes (for the street, for the club, for headphones) that hot hip-hop or dance singles receive. But even they are only scratching the surface of what could be achieved by relinquishing control over the creation of derivative works to radically expand their cultural repertoires.
June 29th, 2006 at 12:50 am
But if they let go of control of derivative works and hence their distribution, how can they monetize on the possible success?
If X big media, allows users to remix a video clip I don’t suppose they can prevent them from distributing over the net. It’s no more part of their catalogue. In which case its success becomes irrelevant to them. Right?
June 29th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
Not necessarily. Just because record labels have begun selling individual songs from their albums through iTunes does not mean they have lost control over those albums. Allowing remix is a (admittedly non-simple) matter of further atomizing the units to which access is sold.
September 5th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
ryan, you`re sure about that? seems that here in EU are different regulations about this…
September 6th, 2006 at 1:51 am
Eric, my comment had nothing to do with legal frameworks but simply with the technical infrastructure: selling access to fragments of songs does not result in loss of control over those songs any more than selling access to fragments of albums results in loss of control over those albums. Of course there may be laws in place restricting the creation of derivative works using those fragments–but in the post above I am discussing business models in which copyright holders relinquish their rights to enforce those restrictions, in exchange for a diversified cultural repertoire. Remember, copyright holders always have the option to give up some of their rights.