P2P & new copyright thinking

Hip-hop is a great example of music that's *so* Digital Age, the Christian Science Monitor points out in a thorough think piece on all Net-based music's shades of gray. "The Internet hasn't only made copying easy, it also has helped foster a culture in which some artists create new work by literally reusing or remixing the work of others. Hip-hop music, built on the idea of 'sampling' the beats or sounds of earlier music, is the most obvious of several examples," the Monitor reports. It creatively pulls together "found [musical] objects of other cultural products," it quotes one expert as saying. Which seems to require a new approach to copyright - the reason why there's so much controversy and litigation over traditional copyright models. Some companies are finding some middle ground, for example, Magnatune.com. That was John Buckman's idea in 2003 when he founded Magnatune.com - "an independent record label that sells music through online downloads and CDs and also licenses music for both commercial and noncommercial use," according to the monitor. Its business plan: "Let people listen to the music all they want for free over the Internet. If they like an album so much they want to own it, they can pay a range of prices from $5 to $18 per album, which they can choose." Most customers pay $8.20/album on average. Half goes to the musician (much more than conventional record labels pay.