Remixology
Remixology
On the Sources of Shareware
The term ‘shareware’ dates from 1984, in the infancy of the digital revolution, although the philosophy for which it stands is much older. Its history is a long one, certainly where music is concerned.When we want to apply the term shareware as a metaphor for a new mentality in art, we should first examine the origins of the term. The roots of shareware of course lie in the computer world. To use the simplest description, it is software that we can download from a network for free and use it, before actually purchasing it. Before the introduction of the personal computer in 1981, the computer world was an anarchistic subculture, in which many small programs circulated, without programmers making any attempt to sell them. Two programmers, Andrew Fluegelman and Jim Knopf, decided to distribute two new applications written for the PC (pc-Talk and pc-File) on ‘bulletin boards’, instead of investing time and money to sell the programs in stores in the conventional fashion. It was their express decision to let the software circulate freely, simply though copying. In the accompanying literature, users were encouraged to send money to the programmers in order to further develop the software. Fluegelman invented the name ‘freeware’ for this process and registered the term as a trade name. In 1984, Softalk PC magazine published an article on the new phenomenon and stumbled on the problem of freeware being a registered, and consequently protected, brand name. A competition was set up to come up with a better term, and the winner turned out to be ‘shareware’. Eventually, the barriers and limitations that prevented large-scale distribution of shareware in the 1980s would disappear with the rise of the Internet and increased downloading speeds. In particular, games became a catalyst for the use of shareware as a marketing tool. For example, certain levels of a game were given away for free, after which, once fully involved in the game, players had to purchase higher levels. In 1993, the revolutionary computer game Doom allowed users to download and distribute a complete version, in order to offer a new version for sale in the shops a full two years later. Doom is an interesting case in point, not only because of its success as a pure shareware product, but also because it generated a previously unimaginable creative tide, thanks to the advent of ‘level editors’ that let users manipulate the game in all kinds of ways, by changing characters, for instance, or building new levels of their own.
Towards a Free Economy
The writer William Gibson once characterized the PC as ‘the revenge of the hippies’.[1] It was actually a double revenge, given the roots of the Internet in the hippie bible, the Whole Earth Catalog. According to Apple’s Steve Jobs, the Whole Earth Catalog was a kind of Google in paperback format, produced 35 years before the search machine became a global trademark. The book was published in 1968 with the explicit purpose of allowing knowledge to circulate freely, thereby removing it from universities and governments (the very institutes that, until the rise of the personal computer, held the monopoly over what were then still unwieldy and unaffordable computers). The Internet has meant that PCs are finally connected, with no central point of control, and that knowledge is freely obtainable to a degree that was hitherto inconceivable. Being opposed to technology for ideological reasons was no longer something one could take for granted. Indeed, technology could now be applied towards free sharing of knowledge, towards ecological issues and alternative economies. The Whole Earth Catalog moreover did not necessarily look down on capitalism, but sought room for change. It preferred durable, small businesses that were financially transparent, preferably based on the development of tools (in the broadest sense) and with different sets of objectives. In this context, shareware can be acknowledged as a marketing idea that is disseminated in a different way. It is open to collaboration and improvement and inherently bears an aspect of gift-giving.[2]Does the Internet then represent a born-again giving economy, aimed at re-establishing social relationships? We actually have to characterize the Internet as a place where the principles of a barter economy work alongside those of gift-giving. That this economy is turning out to be less utopian than the 1968 ideal is certainly clear. Such early Internet ideologues as Howard Rheingold and Kevin Kelley were allied to electronic reincarnations of the Whole Earth Catalog. Their praises of the network economy were visionary in many respects, but they had no perception of the shadow side of the phenomenon, including disastrous stock market behaviour, evaporating dot-com investments, shrinking housing markets, dubious labour conditions and the outsourcing of programmers. Shareware harbours a certain illusion, interwoven with an important aspect of the Internet, namely the fact that beyond access and hardware, most information is available at no cost. It is difficult or virtually impossible for something that is free to also function as a paid service. Initially, shareware was in the form of complete products, but increasingly, it would be distributed in limited versions, to which a complete version could be added once it was paid for. Alternatives that resemble shareware include freeware (available for an indefinite period at no cost, while still under copyright) and free software,[3] which we can perhaps call the most radical variant. Free software (with Linux as the best-known example) is software that operates on the principle of ‘freedom of use’ on behalf of its own anticipated improvement (with source codes provided together with the program.) Both of these alternatives have strongly ideological approaches. They make software accessible at no charge, as a part of good information structure and a cost-free means of creating and implementing good software, with an explicit secondary social aim of expanding freedom in general. ‘These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users’ sake, but because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as more and more of our culture and life activities are digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images and words, free software comes increasingly to equate with freedom in general.’[4]
Cultural Practice
One could see the Internet as a coordinated shareware project, by which content is freely generated in the hope that it will someday be paid for, but that would give an undeservedly charged impression. Ultimately, the Internet is an economic hybrid. After all these years, it continues to surprise us that so much information is created just for the love of it, with no direct financial reward at all. Web 2.0 takes this to the point of making it an ideology, by which users provide the information that they consume, or to better put it, that they absorb, as most social sites are free. Here, shareware can be seen as synonymous for the digital application of identity in a game with no end and no prize – the sharing of the social self as an aimless continuum. Beyond this sceptical view, there are in fact cultural practices that are beginning to take shape, which do indeed follow the example of the software models mentioned above. In contrast to the digitalized visual image, which is provided on the Web at no charge, thanks to the incomprehensible numbers in circulation until, one individual case at a time, those with legal rights press forward their objections, music is probably the most interesting field of battle. Since digitalizing music has become almost as simple a process as scanning a photograph, an impossible situation has been created that has tied copyright law in knots.Since the introduction of the iPod in 2001, the days when the MP3 could be characterized as piracy are definitively behind us. The fact that such a renowned company as Apple undertook this step, together with the iTunes store, for the legal sale of MP3 files, was the point of no return. It made digitalized music acceptable, while the exchange of unauthorized copies was of course only further stimulated. What is often forgotten is that, to a limited degree, artists and labels have been giving away their music in MP3 format right from the start. The independent label M-nus, for example, gave away tracks intended for distribution in the limited vinyl market for DJs.[5] In fact, this has been a long-term process that had already been set in motion by the cassette tape. Until the arrival of MP3 and the CD-ROM, cassette tapes were the ultimate medium for music that broke out of the one-way traffic that legitimate distribution of music imposed on consumers. It can even be said that music genres, in their most creative phase – the rapid circulation of ideas not yet squeezed into structures imposed by the music industry – were driven by the cassette tape. This was true, for example, for the independently operating cassette labels, from punk to black metal and such genres as hip-hop and rave, where the collective event was paramount. In addition, cassettes played a crucial role in the distribution of music in the form of gifts, passed on simply by way of copied record albums, and in more creative form as mixed tapes, with personalized, often thematic compilations, mostly with a ritual expectation of a return gift, or as a musical message (to a loved one, for example), or as a means of promoting good taste.It is no wonder that where new forms of music distribution are concerned, the most outspoken record label originally started by recording cassette tapes. Since the 1980s, Britain’s Irdial Discs has developed as the label that has taken the changing status of music most seriously and truly thought it through. In the philosophical sense, it follows the Free Music Philosophy, which is literally inspired by the principles of free software.[6] Music, therefore, should be free, in order to stimulate creativity, and this means that every individual is free to copy music, distribute it and modify it for personal, non-commercial use. This does not necessarily mean that artists give away their music for nothing, as CDs continue to be sold. What makes Irdial Discs special is not just that they offer digital music for free, but that songs produced as albums are often offered in dissected versions. All the sounds that make up a song are present, so that other musicians can in turn use them in new ways, stimulating creative practice.[7]
Copyright
Shareware, as we have sketched it, is above all a marketing concept. Music offers us a chance to see shareware as a cultural mentality. Shareware stands for openness (freedom), with the underlying thought that it drives a cultural dynamic. As an extension of the ideas of Lawrence Lessing, Paul D. Miller and Lev Manovich, the remix can be identified as the most obvious practice in promoting that dynamic.[8] The remix, or in short, the rearrangement of (musical) elements in order to change the function of a song, goes beyond disco and reggae, at least as far back as Marcel Duchamp. What has undeniably changed is the actual amount of material that is available for remixing, thanks to the accessibility that digitalization offers and thanks to the changing relationship between the producers and the consumers of the content. The artist, author or musician as an autonomous entity seems to have been struck down by a veritable flood, as (re)payment for (post-) structuralist promises. Today, countless ideologies live alongside one another with no hope of ever being united. Futurists, gathered around such themes as the network society or ecology, stand against groups that propagate 19th-century ideas about nation states, or feverishly hope to uphold the construction of the author/genius. This latter phenomenon goes hand in hand with the problems of authorship and copyright. Whether that issue will lead to a definitive solution is doubtful, but the mentality of shareware and remix certainly has a craving for openness. The greatest obstacle to the remix is strict enforcement of copyright. Copyright is not a problem in itself, were it not for the fact that in response to the process of digitalization, a movement has been generated that would, for example, extend copyright periods, and more worryingly, increasingly prevent access to academic texts through the use of copyrights. In the early 1990s, the application of law made short work of the first wave of music that made excessive use of sampling. Since the growth of the Internet, these laws have in fact become problematic. Creative Commons licenses now present an interesting alternative, an incentive for a multifaceted system that gives artists the opportunity to give away their work as they see fit, for example, by specifying that samples are permitted. The use of Creative Commons is by no means without battles of its own. There is a fear of letting go of the security of the classic copyright and, for example, giving away digital versions of books, as well as fear of what other people might do with your material or ideas.[9] In terms of mentality, there is no holding shareware back. In the least advantageous scenario, the situation that we have today will continue. The question that then remains is whether the dynamic of the remix is finite. Will the number of modifications take on such volume that it leads to new, complex hybrids, or does the source material for remixes have an end, whereby the openness of shareware no longer bears fruit? For the visual arts, unlike music, that question does not yet seem to be an issue. The visual arts still appear to have enough realms to investigate and enough sources for remixing. The first initiatives of remixes with games, for example, are to date little more than cautious reconnaissance trips, and the creative use of software in the visual arts is more the exception than the rule. Omar Muñoz-Cremersis a writer and sociologist, Amsterdam
Omar Muñoz-Cremers