Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Economics, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Psychology. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Many people might think that downloading music without paying for it is not a big issue. Copyright owners disagree with this kind of reasoning because to them, music is intellectual property with substantial commercial value. Copyright law is the primary form of protection for intellectual property and is based on the fundamental principle that copyright works cannot be reproduced without the express consent of the copyright owner. During the late 90’s however, new technology made it possible for millions of people to download music from the Internet without the express consent of copyright owners. The mere act of downloading songs illegally violates the exclusive right of the copyright owner to reproduce the work. It has also created problems within copyright law that was not foreseeable in the 17th century when the Statute of Anne was enacted. In law, there is always an exception to the rule and it is no different with copyright law. Although copyright owners have the exclusive right to reproduce their work, the general public has been granted exceptions to make fair dealing of copyright works for private or personal use, purposes of research, private study, criticism, review or for reporting current events in a magazine, newspaper or periodical, broadcasting or by using the work in a cinematograph film by virtue of s12 of the Copyright Act 98 of 1978. However, the list of exceptions supra may be changed and/or extended, provided that it remains in line with the international conventions and agreements that South Africa is a member to. The three-step test is inter alia provided for in Art. 9(2) of the Berne Convention1 (Paris Text of 1971) and permit exceptions to the reproduction right of the copyright owner: 1) in certain special cases; 2) that do not conflict with the normal exploitation of the work and; 3) that does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author/rights holder. S17 provides that certain subsections of s12 shall apply mutatis mutandis with reference to sound recordings. However, s12(1)(a) is not one of the subsections mentioned in s17 which means that fair dealing in sound recordings for purposes of research or private study, or for personal or private use is NOT permitted. Fair dealing however, is not absolute nor is it an easy doctrine to interpret. The legal interpretation and application of fair dealing has been fraught with complexity since the English courts first dealt with fair abridgement of literary works between the 17th and 18th century but this complexity has been compounded even more by new technology, especially in relation to music works. The legal uncertainty of fair dealing with regard to music works is the reason why this comparative research has been undertaken in the jurisdictions of South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. Hopefully it will shed more light on the doctrine and lift the veil of confusion. / Jurisprudence / LLM

This thesis deals with the actual topic in the world of music, distribution of music of Czech musicians after the birth of the Internet. The work is written mainly from a practical point of view, but in the first chapters the reader is also familiar with theoretical concepts such as digitization, distribution, Long -tail Theory or Digital Rights Management. After the introduction to the topic analysis of sales of albums and songs on Czech music market follows, based on the statistics of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry IFPI. Following chapter focuses on the business models of music sales, paid music services available for the Czech market and the issue of intellectual property. There are also explored current trends in music. The final chapters deals with an exploration from the database Market & Media & Lifestyle, and author's research (questionnaire survey). Key words:

This thesis explores history and development of music industry including tools of monetization, from the beginning of music publishing, inventions of various sound recording methods and related birth of recording industry, to various forms of internet-based distribution of recorded music. It especially focuses on digital means of music distribution and their influence on artists, recording companies as well as consumers -- listeners. It maps connections and consequences resulting from over one hundred old paradigm shift caused by rapid evolution of mobile technology and Internet. Especially the last chapter attempts to anticipate future of this market segment, based on the examples of particular artists, even though it is still in a process of on-going changes.

This is a comprehensive study of how Big Data and analytics will be the future of music marketing. There has been a recent trend of being able to turn metrics into quantifiable, real-word predictions. With an increase in online music consumption along with the use of social media there is now a clearer view than ever before about how this will happen. Instead of solely relying on big record companies for an artist to make it to the big time, there is now a plethora of data and analytics available not just to a small number of big companies, but to anyone. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Society’s progression through the digital streaming age has created a music licensing landscape of grave concern to all stakeholders in the industry. These drastic changes have occurred under an outdated legal framework. This paper will recommend a comprehensive reform to our copyright law to uphold the intentions of copyright in the modern, digital age of today. By looking at the history of copyright and its evolution, one can assess how Congress has been tasked with establishing a fair market value for music by promoting the public interest and fairly compensating copyright owners. This will lead to an evaluation and comparison of those methods used to determine fair market value for creative works that will be the basis of the recommendation used to modernize copyright law. This recommendation will comprehensively provide for equitable treatment for all parties in the streaming age through its totality, additional reforms, and alternative ideas. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This dissertation focuses on improving content-based recommendation systems for music. Specifically, progress in the development in music content-based recommendation systems has stalled in recent years due to some faulty assumptions: 1. most acoustic content-based systems for music information retrieval (MIR) assume a bag-of-frames model, where it is assumed that a song contains a simplistic, global audio texture 2. genre, style, mood, and authors are appropriate categories for machine-oriented recommendation 3. similarity is a universal construct and does not vary among different users The main contribution of this dissertation is to address these faulty assumptions by describing a novel approach in MIR that provides user-centric, content-based recommendations based on statistics of acoustic sound elements. First, this dissertation presents the acoustic segment modeling framework that describes a piece of music as a temporal sequence of acoustic segment models (ASMs), which represent individual polyphonic sound elements. A dictionary of ASMs generated in an unsupervised process defines a vocabulary of acoustic tokens that are able to transcribe new musical pieces. Next, standard text-based information retrieval algorithms use statistics of ASM counts to perform various retrieval tasks. Despite a simple feature set compared to other content-based genre recommendation algorithms, the acoustic segment modeling approach is highly competitive on standard genre classification databases. Fundamental to the success of the acoustic segment modeling approach is the ability to model acoustical semantics in a musical piece, which is demonstrated by the detection of musical attributes on temporal characteristics. Further, it is shown that the acoustic segment modeling procedure is able to capture the inherent structure of melody by providing near state-of-the-art performance on an automatic chord recognition task. This dissertation demonstrates that some classification tasks, such as genre, possess information that is not contained in the acoustic signal; therefore, attempts at modeling these categories using only the acoustic content is ill-fated. Further, notions of music similarity are personal in nature and are not derived from a universal ontology. Therefore, this dissertation addresses the second and third limitation of previous content-based retrieval approaches by presenting a user-centric preference rating algorithm. Individual users possess their own cognitive construct of similarity; therefore, retrieval algorithms must demonstrate this flexibility. The proposed rating algorithm is based on the principle of minimum classification error (MCE) training, which has been demonstrated to be robust against outliers and also minimizes the Parzen estimate of the theoretical classification risk. The outlier immunity property limits the effect of labels that arise from non-content-based sources. The MCE-based algorithm performs better than a similar ratings prediction algorithm. Further, this dissertation discusses extensions and future work.

Zugl.: Krems, Universiẗat, Masterarbeit. / Literaturverz.

Thesis(Ph.D. (Communication Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / Digital technologies are increasingly revolutionising music consumption patterns globally. Consequently, there is an emerging culture in which online tools have become primary platforms for music consumption. In this postmodern era, digital technologies make music easily accessed, consumed and shared, thereby providing a seemingly global recognition to artistes beyond their immediate geographical market. As a result, artistes sometimes distribute their music for free with the intention to reach potential consumers. Equally, these technologies also allow consumers to illegally access and share music freely without financial compensation to the artistes. At the same time artistes also sell their music through different online stores to generate revenue. Alongside these developments, there are challenges with access to the Internet in South Africa with older adults and those in rural areas being disadvantaged, and the cost of Internet curtailing what youths can afford to do online. This then prompts critical questions: How do older adults and youth listen to music? Where and how do they access music? How does the new digitalised music affect their music consumption? What are the implications of all these to the social capital and social lifestyles of youth and older South African adults? Also, how has the digitalisation of music impacted on the political economy of the music industry in South Africa? In what ways do the illegal and legal downloads of music benefit or disadvantage local artistes? From a critical theorisation of an emerging ‘download culture’ and a discussion of the postmodern technological turn, this study examined a case study of South African youth and older adults’ music consumption pattern. Through a survey of 202 university students in a rural South African university and 100 older adults from semi rural areas of Limpopo Province in South Africa, the study examined the ways youth and older adults access and consume music. It explored music sharing habits and opinions about piracy in a culture where music has become instantaneously shareable. Apart from findings from this study, new knowledge and a contribution to communication scholarship is presented here with a proposal of new theory of ‘download culture’. Fundamental to this study is the implications of download culture for the creative industry, predominantly, its impact on the South African music industry. The data show that this cohort of South African youth are not different from youths globally, where music is accessed through mobile cell phones. This study also reflects that many older adults do not access digitalised music due to socio economic conditions and challenges of technology access. Nevertheless, the social cultural impact of this has repercussions on the cultural well-being of this vital group in society. Although internet access challenges persist, a critical concern is the blurring distinctions about the legal and illegal download of music. / National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS), in collaboration with the South African Humanities Deans Association (SAHUDA)