Podcast

The podcast I recorded is based on a article by Tim Wood a senior writer at bleacher report. The article is about rumours that have happened in the past in sports. I once again talk about basketball as the main points. Picking this article was easy for me because I do not always agree with the rumours surrounding sports. This is due to the lack of consistency and the affects it can have.

It is my first ever podcast so please bare with me on it! There are lots of room for improvement!!





Wood, T. (2010, May 17). Craziest Rumors in Sports. Bleacher Report. Retrieved from http://bleacherreport.com/articles/393219-lebron-james-mom-delonte-west-and-the-20-craziest-rumors-in-sports

Summative Blog Post: Free Music or iTunes?

For this weeks blog I was a little surprised when reading others post that they actually download music of iTunes. With so many different ways for people to get music free why pay? I was also very surprised of Riley’s comment when she said “You may be one of the first people I know of who purchases albums off of Amazon (I'm curious to know why you don't buy the album at HMV or Sunrise).” To answer this question, I use Amazon because it takes 1-2 days to actually get the album. Amazon also offers discounts to repeat customers, which is very useful. I find that with the advancements of online shopping that HMV and Sunrise are very likely to go out of business, it is much easier to earn the discounts from a site that you may purchase more then one item.

I was also surprised that newmediumnewmessage said, “I have just recently discovered how easy it is to illegally download.” Many people do not know websites in where they can download free music and some of the websites are a little bit fishy when you first go on them. These websites have popup, which can scare some people away. I have never heard of someone being charged with downloading online. Though, I have once downloaded a movie off a website when I was younger and got a message in the mail saying I have downloaded a movie that is not out on DVD yet, and it was just a warning from Rogers that I should stop. Also, like Riley said in her post "Being a musician/artist creating a fan base is way more important because those fans will support you by purchasing merchandise or concert tickets."  The amount of money people saves when downloading music or DVD’s for free can go towards people’s education instead towards iTunes. They can even go towards people going to see artist concerts in which they might purchase merchandise.  I find that it is very useful to download illegally and if someone asked me how to download a song online I would gladly show them. 

The Art of Music: To Purchase Rather than Download

When purchasing music I either buy a song on iTunes or buy an album on Amazon. How many people do you think actually do this though? I am a avid fan of downloading my music rather than purchasing it from places like Apple and Amazon. I know that most Athletes listen to music before a game and have always wondered how they get their songs and often find myself asking “Do they get it before the public since its possible they are friends with the artists? Do they download it? Or do they do the right thing and purchase it?

“The battle over online music in the US turned ugly in the summer of 2003 when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) initiated lawsuits against its own consumers (Condry, 2004)”. Also Burkhart and McCourt (2003) state, “The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) extended intellectual property protection to domains pre- viously overlooked by federal copyright law. When people are downloading music it is technically illegal and with a copyright code record labels can sue the people who “leak” albums and songs. This sometimes scares people into downloading music or videos because they think that if they get caught they can possibly get charged or sued for lots of money.

Purchasing music can be very expensive. On iTunes it costs $1.29 per song and as a student who enjoys listening to music it could be very pricey in the long run. The quality is usually better when you buy a song but if you like burning CD’s for your car or friends downloading makes the music into a MP3 mod is better. It allows you to put more than 19 songs and you can still enjoy the music at a lesser quality. If I could tell people weather to download a song or purchase I would recommend that they download. This practice conflicts with copyright issues because I would be recommending people to break the law.

Overall, I think that if iTunes charged a monthly fee much like Netflixs more people would be welcome to purchasing music online. It would allow consumers to purchase a monthly subscription with songs that they can listen to and keep on there computers for a certain amount of time. 

References 

McCourt, T., P. Burkart. (2003). When Creators, Corporations and Consumers Collide: Napster and the Development of On-line Music Distribution. Media, Culture & Society. 25 (3), pg. 333-350 

Condry, Ian. (2004). Cultures of Music Piracy: An Ethnographic Comparison of the US and Japan. International Journal of Cultural Studies. 7 (3), pg. 343-363  

Sports: They Can Be Remixed Too!!

The short video I show the that sports can be remixed just like movies, television, and music. I specifically focus on the NBA in the short video and show that when one team becomes creative and WINS others will follow to do the same!

I created the clip using Mozilla Popcorn, and took the videos used from YouTube, while the pictures where taken from google. The pictures have direct links to the original posters. 

Here it is!! https://brandonisraelson.makes.org/popcorn/15q3

Hope you enjoy!!

Brandon

Summative Blog Post: Surprising

This week’s module was to give us (the class) the knowledge that many things we consume have already been created once before. There were many surprises this week for me because I love music, and movies. It is very hard for people born in the 90s to know that the music they might be listening to contains content from someone else’s song created in the 40s/60s/etc. I used to thing some producers were just creative in making instrumentals for song artist, but know I wonder if they are just using something that was already created. With movies it is understandable because there are so many of them but its very hard to come up with a blockbuster film without having the creation of a film that was not a successful book or the movie being a sequel. Many movies that have broken records (Batman, Avengers, Harry Potter) are based a book/comic that people grew up loving. There are so many books out there, that have yet to be transformed into movies but as a movie lover I still look forward to seeing movies and listening to music that have remade into new versions of the original. 

Courtney Semmler brought up a great quote in her comments about in my initial blog this week “Online Consumer/Produce: A Copyright Free Internet?” This quote was "If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research" by Wilson Mizner. This is exactly how YouTube works, people steal a video and make it there own, and this keeps continuing throughout YouTube. If a YouTube user is creating a cover of a successful song it is the same process. It would be interesting for me to see people to come up with there own creative ideas and become the next online success story. 

Online Consumer/Produce: A Copyright Free Internet?

Kirby Ferguson’s four-part documentary (Everything is a Remix) was very interesting. He showed his followers that many things in Hollywood are repeated or “fixed” into how the artists want it. I found that in the video’s we learn that many movies are based on books, or sequels, and that songs instrumentals are very similar to original songs made by jazz artist in the early 1900’s.  

In the past year, I have consumed and produced many different things by incorporating it online.  Consumed is a very big part of online history for people, it is typically the knowledge that one has absorbed from online. Assignments handed out in class would not be completed if it weren’t for looking online to make it creditable. Many people also consume different things. I may enjoy sports but not everyone does. So when I gain knowledge online about sports, I am consuming the information. Producers love consumers! To be a producer you are hoping that consumers are going to buy or in Kirby Ferguson’s case donate. With that said, I have produced online material using YouTube so that everyone could enjoy what was made. But I did not charge anyone money or ask for any donations. Today many of the clips on video-sharing sites like YouTube bear a remarkable similarity to these early films. They too address the audience directly, are exhibitionist and are frequently sensational and shocking (Rizzo. T). To be encouraged to produce my own online content I would have to be very committed to the topic and need financial backup to keep it interesting and fun!

Online communities of “producer- consumers” literate in new media work toward building a robust and freely accessible cultural commons in the face of restrictive copyright laws in many different ways. For instance Jenkins (2004) said in his article that “New media technologies have lowered production and distribution costs, expanded the range of available delivery channels and enabled consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate and recirculate media content in powerful new ways.” Have I followed these rules? no ... When downloading music I do not buy it from iTunes or buy a CD from a store, I download it from a website. I know that I am facing copyright laws by doing this but it has never stopped me from continuing. Many people around the world do not follow these laws and if they were to build a new way of having a cleaner internet, I think many people would be left unhappy!

References

 

Rizzo, T. YouTube: the New Cinema of Attractions SCAN | journal of media arts culture. Vol 5, No. 1, Online journal.

Jenkins, H. (2004) The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence  International Journal of Cultural Studies March 2004 7: 33-43