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Digital Consumer Class Consciousness Dawns on a Grey Tuesday international |
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 Saturday November 27, 2004 19:10 by mobfilms
 For Ultramack's 10th Birthday "a kind of "war machine" at work within and against the edifice of mass music" Grey Tuesday, in its scope and success, can be taken as something akin to the dawning of a consumer class consciousness--members of the Internet community had the collective knowledge and means to put a popular work of art into circulation without the support or permission of the recording industry. One could say that consumers have taken over the distribution of musical goods and services to the detriment of those who have heretofore controlled the means of musical production. The near-instantaneous, viral replication of information on a global network renders moot the legal formalities of trademark and copyright. The traditional radio station, with its fixed formats and mind-numbingly repetitive playlists, has been effectively displaced by technologies that allow music fans to specify what they want to hear and when they want to hear it. Radio and online broadcasting remain useful avenues for discovering new artists, but control over the music is no longer contingent upon the exchange of cash. In the age of digital communism, a song's exchange value evaporates as soon as that song hits the network.
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