User:Tom Marcing/sandbox

Note: this text is intended to be a continuation of the 'Do-it-yourself Culture' subsection of the article about Mashup (culture). It is intended to appear right after the Serazio quote.

The do-it-yourself aspect of mashup culture is at the center of an ongoing discussion in the field of media studies. Most notably, it is relevant when discussing what media scholar Henry Jenkins calls participatory culture. This view of culture is one where the distinction between consumer and producer is blurred. In such contexts, digital technologies allow those who were passive consumers in the past to create their own cultural content, and subsequently distribute it online. Mashups allow users to appropriate cultural material and re-shape it into original products. They may thus be said to contribute to participatory culture.

The positive relation between mashups and participatory culture and the involvement of user agency it implies may be an answer to fears formulated notably by John Philip Sousa at the beginning of the 20th century. In his fight for artists to perceive royalty fees when their music was reproduced on the newly introduced vinyls and on the radio, Sousa claimed that the ease of access to recorded music may mean the end of amateur practice of music. As consumers would have increasingly easy access to recorded music, he explained, they would feel less compelled to make music for and by themselves. In contemporary literature, this is referred to as a change from a 'Read/Write culture' to a 'Read/Only culture'. Mashup culture, since it enables participatory culture, can be said to encourage amateur practices, which Sousa thought would be lost. In participatory culture, and by extension in mashup culture, consumers are no longer passive; empowered by digital technology, they become themselves a producer, an actor in cultural life.

The creators of mashup songs form communities in which exchange of knowledge and source files is common place. Such forms of online sharing have been argued to create bonds between users and encourage collaboration, sometimes in situations in which obstacles such as ideological divides or indivisibility of resources might otherwise be a threat to fruitful collaboration. Another positive aspect of such communities is the possibility for collaboration and the creation of bonds between users. Online music communities have been argued to be a place where collaboration is catalyzed. Virtual collaborations between artists are born in online communities that are sometimes carried over and lead to members physicially meeting.

The mashup culture raises issues related to intellectual property, as the material used by mashup artists is, by definition, not their own, and often protected by copyright. The logic of copyright has been said to go against that of the 'Read/Write culture' previously mentioned in a favor of a 'Read/Only culture', in which cultural material is the exclusive propriety of its original producers. For mashup artists, it often means that their creations can be taken down from streaming services at the request of copyright holders; it also allows copyright holders to sue mashup artists who did not pay any royalty fee. In effect, this threatens the potential of mashup culture to empower consumers, as royalty fee represents a cost for mashup artists. This had led several media scholars to suggest adapting or removing existing copyright laws to accommodate mashup practices.

Literature
Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. London: Bloomsbury