Radio Berkman

Musicians often feel besieged on all sides. Promoters, labels, publishers, radio stations, and venues can make an artist feel exploited and overwhelmed. But in the digital age it might feel like fans and fellow musicians are taking a bite out of them, too.

Second to piracy the phenomenon of fan created content is the greatest irritation to professional musicians and their stakeholders. From the upload of a song to YouTube (which involves almost no creative effort) to sampling, remixing or creating a fan-made music video — many artists feel fan initiatives show disrespect for their rights. And some are using the tools of PR and the law to make their voices heard.

Jay Rosenthal is the General Counsel for the National Music Publishers’ Association with decades of experience working with music industry organizations on the legal side, and representing artists like Salt n Pepa, Thievery Corporation, and Mary Chapin Carpenter.

We talked about professional musicianship, and what kind of threat sampling and remix projects (like Girl Talk’s “All Day” and DJ Danger Mouse’s “Grey Album”) pose to the music industry.

The story of Google’s rise to prominence is one of consistently radical innovation. In the 1990s Google reinvented the model of the search engine — transforming it to an algorithmically-driven ranking system — and online advertising — making it possible for anyone to be an advertiser or advertisement host.

Since then Google has taken on and dominated almost every other sector of the web by taking advantage of — and in many ways building — some of the web’s greatest assets: speed, openness, and ability to take risks and experiment.

That’s according to Steven Levy, author of the new book In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.

But the story of Google is not just one of innovation. It’s a coming of age story in which a young, idealistic startup is confronted with the harsh realities of growing into the world’s third largest tech company: antitrust investigations, lawsuits, and a particularly tense standoff with the leadership of the largest country in the world.

Steven Levy is a senior writer for Wired Magazine, and he joins us today to talk about his new best-selling profile of Google.

From the wax cylinder to the MP3 tracking global trends in music has changed a great deal over time.

In 1933, the Lomax family of ethnomusicologists and folklorists traipsed around the world with a 315-pound phonograph recorder to collect the music and stories of dozens of cultures. Today, it might be more useful to fire up YouTube or MySpace to see what bubbles up.

But the digital music revolution has also made it easier for music to cross boundaries, for trends to spread, intermingle, and evolve much faster than ever before. And musical recordings, along with many of the tools used to share and create music online have often been victim to the impermanence of the web, making the job of the modern ethnomusicologist harder than ever.

Ethan Zuckerman sat down with one such ethnomusicologist, Wayne Marshall — a blogger, DJ, and post-doctoral scholar at MIT working on a book about global youth culture and digital music — to talk about his work.

Strike another entry off the list of things robots CAN’T do.

Geeks competed this past winter in Socialbots 2011 to create robots capable of forming relationships on Twitter in a competition organized by Tim Hwang and the Web Ecology Project. The winning bot was the one who could gain the most followers and have the most 140 character conversations with other human beings without intervention.

And the bots actually WORKED.

The real world applications for such technology are endless — non-profits, activist groups, e-commerce, the military — all could benefit from artificial intelligence to infiltrate social networks. And might be already…

Did you ever wonder how artists become rock stars? Sure, talent is a big part of it. But behind almost every successful musician — from the platinum selling pop idol to the quirky regional artist who only sells records by the handful — you’ll probably find at least one person, if not a team of people working hard to make sure the business side of the music business stays going.

And if you think that’s changed with the digital revolution, you’d be surprised. Sure, technology has made the recording process easier, and artists can connect directly with fans and promote shows easily through the web. But putting together a hit and sharing it with the world is hardly a solo effort.

Today we sit down with two of the folks who help keep the music flowing. “Big” Jon Platt is President of EMI Music Publishing’s North American creative team, and responsible for signing Jay-Z among countless other chart-topping artists. Kim Buie is the Vice President of A&R for Lost Highway records out of Nashville, the home of artists like Lucinda Williams, Willie Nelson, and Tom Jones.

In recent months citizens of the Middle East and North Africa have experienced widespread shutdowns of internet access, coinciding with revolutions to overthrow national leadership. The seeming ease with which the Internet has been silenced in Libya, Egypt, and other countries has raised questions about ethical issues behind an Internet “Kill Switch,” the idea of a single point of access by which any nation’s leadership could shutdown their internet access.

In the United States, debate over so-called “Kill Switch” legislation has focused on the free speech aspect. If it were technologically possible to shutdown internet access singlehandedly who is to say that power wouldn’t be exploited as it has been abroad?

But on the other side of the coin is the question of cyber security. With so much commerce, communication, and security dependent on a loose and non-standardized network infrastructure, it could actually make sense to have an easy way to quarantine a bug or massive cyber attack.

Today, hosts Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain are joined by Andrew McLaughlin — a former Berkman Fellow and White House Deputy Chief Technology Office — and Brett Solomon — Executive Director of Access, a global movement promoting digital freedom. Together with an audience Lessig and Zittrain take on the Kill Switch.

Musicians are increasingly becoming their own managers, promoters, bookers, and agents. And with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, BandCamp, and dozens of other ways of staying in touch with their audience, the concert never stops.

There’s no way to put a dollar value on this engagement, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile.

How are artists building an audience, completely outside of their music, simply by opening up online?

Nancy Baym — author of the recent book Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Professor of Communications at University of Kansas, and all around music aficionado — joined me this week to talk about how fans are building genuine relationships online and how artists are able to thrive because of them.

Big music publishers may be worried about declining CD sales and the inability of digital purchases to make up the difference.

But independent artists have continued to create, innovate, connect with fans, and even make a pretty decent living on their own, without big budget promotions — or even physical copies of their albums in stores.

For today’s show we were lucky to be joined by two amazing artists:

Amanda Palmer sat down with David Weinberger to talk about her latest self-release, Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under, and her mission to redefine what success as a musician means.

And Donald Glover chatted with us about the wonder of his quintuple threat career — star of NBC’s Community, writer, standup comic, remix artist, and rapper — his most recent release, and how he makes a living making music that is free as in beer, and free as in speech.

The idea that technology could want something seems kind of outlandish, almost like science fiction. But journalist Kevin Kelly is proposing a kind of technological self-determination in his new book What Technology Wants.

It’s not exactly robots with souls that Kelly is suggesting. It’s more of an evolutionary theory of technological development, the idea that one technology naturally evolves from another. That the mobile phone, for instance, was an inevitable evolution from the telephone, or that the internet we know today was an inevitable next step from the spread of the networked PC.

Well, not exactly inevitable. Best listen to David Weinberger’s interview with Kevin Kelly to hear him explain it himself.

Our emails have been dinging off the hook here at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, with notes from journalists and concerned citizens trying to make some sense of the story-in-progress that is Wikileaks.

So today we pull together some of the brightest minds at the Berkman Center to talk about Wikileaks, with Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig moderating.

Zittrain, Lessig, and the Berkman Center Fellows explore many facets surrounding the Wikileaks imbroglio, including the values of transparency and freedom of speech; the legality and ethics of the Wikileaks data dump; the role of the news media; and the involvement of government and private tech organizations to take Wikileaks down.