Private Ownership of Music
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In the early twenty-first century, music is laden with ‘rights’ to their enjoyment. Rights-owners of musical recordings own the sounds people marry their happiest memories with and demand compensation for continuous enjoyment of their property. The largest rights-owners take the form of Record Labels, vertically integrated organizations engaged in the sourcing, production, and recording of original musical sounds for the purpose of securing and monetizing rights to their enjoyment.
The Record Label dynamic turns cultural output into financial asset. The largest music catalogs span decades, genres, and geographies; a very weird space own, with very unorthodox dimensionality, the kind of space it's only possible to own through de jure aspectification of reality (e.g., Common Law's "water rights" and "air rights").
✎ Connection to