The Reorganization of Music Copyright
... and Artistic Value in the Digital Age
Issues surrounding music copyright cannot be fully understood solely through the legal lens of how strictly to restrict the unauthorized use of existing songs. At the root of this lies a structural contradiction: musicians, who create the music, and the executives of music-related companies—who record, distribute, and monetize it—play distinct roles, and their value systems do not align. While musicians prioritize the quality of their work, the artistic necessity of their expression, the uniqueness of their performances, and cultural context, the companies and platforms responsible for distribution tend to prioritize measurable metrics such as the number of plays, usage time, advertising efficiency, and the ease of rights clearance. Consequently, it can be said that the industry has developed into a structure where the value of a work is generally assessed not by its artistic content, but as information that can be easily converted into revenue.
To begin with, copyright is a system that originated with the Statute of Anne in 1710, during the era of the printing press, when reproduction required significant physical effort and time. However, in the digital environment, audio sources can be reproduced almost without any loss of quality, at low cost, and in unlimited quantities. Furthermore, technologies such as automatic music notation, audio separation, music recognition, and generative AI have made it easy to extract melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral characteristics from recordings and convert them into different formats. Given this situation, it is becoming extremely difficult to define the boundary between creation and infringement based solely on the binary distinction of “whether or not it has been reproduced.” While transcribing music and transcribing by ear are acts of reproduction, they also involve the fundamental element of “learning” through which musicians acquire style, musical language, and physical sensibility. Since all creative work involves a process of internalizing past musical experiences, transforming them, and then externalizing them, it is inherently difficult to completely separate influence from plagiarism.
The modern copyright system is designed not to determine in advance the “fundamental elements of music creation”—such as a musician’s “learning” or “artistic sensibility”—but rather to assess the similarity of music and songs that have already been created and widely distributed. As the volume of circulating audio content grows, it becomes fundamentally impossible for humans to keep track of every single instance of use. As a result, only large-scale, capital-intensive platforms equipped with extensive monitoring and matching systems end up playing a central role in copyright management. Could it not be said that this structure closely resembles the historical dynamic in which music performed and recorded at courts and in churches was preserved as legitimate culture, while music played in taverns and on the streets was marginalized? In the modern era, the legitimacy of copyright may be determined not so much by the artistic merit of a work, but rather by which platform it is registered with and which management system recognizes its “copyright.”
However, rights management by large-scale platforms does not necessarily exist to protect the artistic integrity of music. In many cases, there is a tendency to prioritize the collection of usage fees, the conversion of those fees into advertising revenue, and the ability to calculate rights relationships. Aesthetic judgments—such as the context in which a work is performed or how an adaptation imparts new meaning to the original composition—are not well-suited to automated processing. For example, the case of JOURNEY discovering Arnel Pineda through a cover performance on video and welcoming him as a band member illustrates how “imitation”—which would normally be subject to regulation (or rather, pose a risk)—actually generated new musical value. What is important is not the automated judgment by the platform’s algorithms, but rather that the original musician himself recognized the value of the imitated performance, realized its potential to bring about a different kind of value, and accepted it favorably.
Musicians generally find that the more time they devote to their specialized fields—such as mastering their instruments or composing—the more they are forced to distance themselves from “administrative tasks” like contracts, promotion, distribution, and rights management. Generally speaking, the more they strive to enhance their musical sensibilities, performance skills, and artistic abilities, the more difficult it becomes to develop financial acumen and business judgment, leading them to rely increasingly on the capital and management structures of others. While copyright is a system designed to protect creators, it can also be said to be a system that allows those in a position to acquire, accumulate, and manage rights—that is, “businesspeople” and “capitalists” who are not musicians—to exert their capabilities more effectively. Couldn’t the claim that “rock is dead” be interpreted not as the disappearance of “rock” as a form of expression, but rather as a pessimistic assessment of a situation in which musicians can no longer lead the direction of the music industry and have become unable to fully curb the overwhelming trend toward commercialization?
AI-generated music is likely to further amplify this contradiction. If generative technology is used to explore and experiment with unknown soundscapes, temporal structures distinct from those of humans, and collaborations between the human body and machines, it has the potential to renew the very concept of music and give rise to new forms of “expression.” However, at present, the internet is particularly flooded with AI-generated audio—created primarily to maximize revenue efficiency—that has little to do with musicality or artistic merit. As a result, music that prioritizes musicality and artistic merit—especially “experimental” works that serve as the core of new forms of expression—is being buried beneath this vast sea of information. Therefore, the challenge we must address goes beyond simply strengthening copyright regulations. What is needed is education that helps musicians understand the structure of rights and revenue, transparency in contracts and distribution, rights management that reflects artistic intent, systems to sustain small-scale distribution networks, and the development of evaluation criteria that go beyond mere play counts. What contemporary music needs is not to completely block copying, but rather to recognize the differences between imitation, inheritance, transformation, criticism, and collaboration—and to redesign an environment where creators can return to the center of value judgments concerning artistry and creativity.
To begin with, copyright is a system that originated with the Statute of Anne in 1710, during the era of the printing press, when reproduction required significant physical effort and time. However, in the digital environment, audio sources can be reproduced almost without any loss of quality, at low cost, and in unlimited quantities. Furthermore, technologies such as automatic music notation, audio separation, music recognition, and generative AI have made it easy to extract melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral characteristics from recordings and convert them into different formats. Given this situation, it is becoming extremely difficult to define the boundary between creation and infringement based solely on the binary distinction of “whether or not it has been reproduced.” While transcribing music and transcribing by ear are acts of reproduction, they also involve the fundamental element of “learning” through which musicians acquire style, musical language, and physical sensibility. Since all creative work involves a process of internalizing past musical experiences, transforming them, and then externalizing them, it is inherently difficult to completely separate influence from plagiarism.
The modern copyright system is designed not to determine in advance the “fundamental elements of music creation”—such as a musician’s “learning” or “artistic sensibility”—but rather to assess the similarity of music and songs that have already been created and widely distributed. As the volume of circulating audio content grows, it becomes fundamentally impossible for humans to keep track of every single instance of use. As a result, only large-scale, capital-intensive platforms equipped with extensive monitoring and matching systems end up playing a central role in copyright management. Could it not be said that this structure closely resembles the historical dynamic in which music performed and recorded at courts and in churches was preserved as legitimate culture, while music played in taverns and on the streets was marginalized? In the modern era, the legitimacy of copyright may be determined not so much by the artistic merit of a work, but rather by which platform it is registered with and which management system recognizes its “copyright.”
However, rights management by large-scale platforms does not necessarily exist to protect the artistic integrity of music. In many cases, there is a tendency to prioritize the collection of usage fees, the conversion of those fees into advertising revenue, and the ability to calculate rights relationships. Aesthetic judgments—such as the context in which a work is performed or how an adaptation imparts new meaning to the original composition—are not well-suited to automated processing. For example, the case of JOURNEY discovering Arnel Pineda through a cover performance on video and welcoming him as a band member illustrates how “imitation”—which would normally be subject to regulation (or rather, pose a risk)—actually generated new musical value. What is important is not the automated judgment by the platform’s algorithms, but rather that the original musician himself recognized the value of the imitated performance, realized its potential to bring about a different kind of value, and accepted it favorably.
Musicians generally find that the more time they devote to their specialized fields—such as mastering their instruments or composing—the more they are forced to distance themselves from “administrative tasks” like contracts, promotion, distribution, and rights management. Generally speaking, the more they strive to enhance their musical sensibilities, performance skills, and artistic abilities, the more difficult it becomes to develop financial acumen and business judgment, leading them to rely increasingly on the capital and management structures of others. While copyright is a system designed to protect creators, it can also be said to be a system that allows those in a position to acquire, accumulate, and manage rights—that is, “businesspeople” and “capitalists” who are not musicians—to exert their capabilities more effectively. Couldn’t the claim that “rock is dead” be interpreted not as the disappearance of “rock” as a form of expression, but rather as a pessimistic assessment of a situation in which musicians can no longer lead the direction of the music industry and have become unable to fully curb the overwhelming trend toward commercialization?
AI-generated music is likely to further amplify this contradiction. If generative technology is used to explore and experiment with unknown soundscapes, temporal structures distinct from those of humans, and collaborations between the human body and machines, it has the potential to renew the very concept of music and give rise to new forms of “expression.” However, at present, the internet is particularly flooded with AI-generated audio—created primarily to maximize revenue efficiency—that has little to do with musicality or artistic merit. As a result, music that prioritizes musicality and artistic merit—especially “experimental” works that serve as the core of new forms of expression—is being buried beneath this vast sea of information. Therefore, the challenge we must address goes beyond simply strengthening copyright regulations. What is needed is education that helps musicians understand the structure of rights and revenue, transparency in contracts and distribution, rights management that reflects artistic intent, systems to sustain small-scale distribution networks, and the development of evaluation criteria that go beyond mere play counts. What contemporary music needs is not to completely block copying, but rather to recognize the differences between imitation, inheritance, transformation, criticism, and collaboration—and to redesign an environment where creators can return to the center of value judgments concerning artistry and creativity.