Participants in an online music scene who rearrange spliced parts of musical pieces form mashup culture. The audio-files are normally in

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

format and spliced with audio-editing software online. The new, edited song is called mashup. The expression mashup culture is also strongly connected to mashup in music. Even though it was not originally a political community, the production of mash-up music is related to the issue of

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

. Mashup Culture is even regarded as "a response to larger technological, institutional, and social contexts".

History

The history of mashup culture in general can be dated back to the beginnings of

dada Dada () or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Pari ...

and

conceptual art Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called insta ...

. Artists such as

Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...

were the first to introduce already existing objects, which they rearranged and combined in collages, to the world of higher art. These artists believed that even though certain artifacts were ascribed a certain meaning, this meaning could be altered through rearranging them and putting them into a new context. However, it was still quite a long way to the beginning of mashup culture in music. From the early 2000s on, music was more and more distributed through the internet. With the introduction of MP3 audio files, it became much easier to access and download music. Not only could music be accessed easier, it could also be transformed and mixed in ways that were not possible before. Especially for younger people, this new gained freedom when it came to the accessibility of

audio files An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, ofte ...

lead to the development of a new form of cult around the transformation of musical pieces. This "reworking MP3 recordings pulled from the Internet" was turning into more than just a fashion just as "the Internet is more than just a means of distribution, it becomes a ''raison d’eˆtre'' for a culture based on audio data’’ states Alistair Riddell in 2001. During that time, the first versions of mashup music were published, sometimes not under the term ''mashup'' but under the name of " creative bootleg" or "

bastard pop A mashup (also mesh, mash up, mash-up, blend, bastard pop or bootleg) is a creative work, usually a song, created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, typically by superimposing the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumenta ...

". Even though the creation of a new song by combining at least two samples of different songs was also used in other music styles such as Hip Hop before, it was only with the rise of the MP3 audio file along with easy-to-use computer mash-up programs that mash-up was transformed into an own culture as such. Especially

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...

sharing was contributing to this phenomenon: People who create mashup music can easily distribute it and share it with other people through online programs.

Forms of mashup culture

Mashup culture is motivated by a number of different factors.

Statement of art

Mashup culture is sometimes regarded as a cultural movement against common, existing music that is published by the music industry. In 2002, a ''

Newsweek ''Newsweek'' is an American weekly online news magazine co-owned 50 percent each by Dev Pragad, its president and CEO, and Johnathan Davis, who has no operational role at ''Newsweek''. Founded as a weekly print magazine in 1933, it was widely ...

'' article described the mashup of songs as a strategy of Londoner DJs to transform music they considered bad into something they could appreciate and were willing to listen to. Even though mashup culture has its origin in online communities, it entered a more art-related realm. It is art used as a statement against the content music industry provides.

Political statement

It can even be considered as a political statement against copyright laws and restrictions imposed by the government as well. "Reframing of the original narrative" is regarded as a way to create a new and unique product which leads to a "fresh perspective" of the original. Murray states "there’s the question of the kind of Internet we want moving forward – one increasingly controlled by corporate gatekeepers who get to sanction what creative expression looks like, or one in which the freedom of this expression is valued above share price". Copyright issues have always been limiting the possibilities of mashup culture. Those implications by law have led to the problem of

online piracy Online piracy or software piracy is the practice of downloading and distributing copyrighted works digitally without permission, such as music or software. The principle behind piracy has predated the creation of the Internet, but its online popul ...

. Mashups are often created with illegally acquired content. This closeness to illegality has become part of this culture. "In some cases, the illegality of piracy contributes to the appeal of unauthorized copies online" states Shiga in her articl
Copy-and-Persist: The Logic of Mash-Up Culture
Even though copyright laws were intentionally supposed to stop illegal downloads, they contributed to the appeal of mashup and to the culture existing around it.

Do-it-yourself culture

Another important aspect of the success of mashup culture nowadays lies in the do-it-yourself or DIY trend. Consumers are turning into producers as well, especially due to the simplification of online tools that help creating personalized content.

Mashup in current literature

DJ Spooky

Paul D. Miller, also known as

DJ Spooky Paul Dennis Miller (born September 6, 1970), known professionally as DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is an American electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called by critics "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntabli ...

, ''Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture'', a book about mashup culture's influence on society. It focuses on "the nature of that transformation", stating that it has been "fuelled by rapid advances in technology that have transformed art and communication".Weidenbaum 2008 He describes sampling as an essential part of our society. The book was published by the

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

Press and has been regarded highly by scholars such as

Lawrence Lessig Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard ...

Literature

References

{{Appropriation in the Arts Mashup Intellectual property activism