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Music to our ears
My recent post comparing the RIAA to Richard Scarry's "Pie Rats" occasioned some vigorous debate in the comments, along with a couple of interesting emails: Jeremy Schlosberg, who did some writing for me years ago when I edited Salon's technology coverage, wrote in to point me to his Fingertips site, which catalogues freely and legally available MP3s: "Something that tends to get overlooked whenever the MP3 situation is debated is the fact that there are actually an amazing number of free and legal MP3s available online for discriminating music fans, and it's not all amateur crap either. Discussion tends to focus on the illegal stuff people trade or the legal stuff people are tentatively starting to buy, but there is a rich middle ground of free and legal music that's worth knowing about as well."
And Shuman Ghosemajumder emailed to tell me about his Open Music Model proposal. Many readers may already be familiar with Terry Fisher's proposal for a royalty system for file sharing. These ideas and others like them floating around are evidence that the RIAA's critics are not simply saying "to hell with the artists" or "to hell with business models." We're saying, online distribution -- and redistribution -- of music makes sense and is here to stay. So what can we do now?
There's more good stuff on this over in Salon Technology: a point/counterpoint on the RIAA lawsuits, and some letters, and some more letters.
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Jay Rosen's CJR piece
People who hung out in Table Talk in its early days remember the presence of Jay Rosen, who encouraged us to think about tightening the relationship between the journalism we were doing in Salon magazine and the discussions that were taking place on our boards. For various reasons we never really got there. Rosen moved on to other things too (he's chairman of NYU's Journalism Dept.). But he recently sent me a link to an article he wrote for Columbia Journalism Review that continues the discussion and is well worth reading.
Rosen is interested in how the online medium continues to break down the lines of authority in traditional journalism, using the two examples of the recent New York Times meltdown and Chris Allbritton's reader-sponsored reporting from Iraq. The one thing I'd say is that these examples are at extreme ends of a spectrum, and though such outliers make the most dramatic contrast, they rarely point the way to the future. Only a handful of journalistic institutions have the Times' reputation, and only a handful of bloggers (I believe) are ever going to be commissioned by their readers the way Allbritton was. What will be more interesting, I think, is to see how the rise of expert bloggers begins to eat away at the edges of trade journalism (as it already has), and local journalism, and other areas where the pros, today, often fall down on the job -- or the institutional structures that should support professional journalism no longer bear weight.
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