No – that’s a new name on me, but a quick Google search amply demonstrates that Woodmansee is someone I need to be engaging with in the research for this book.

This is one of the things I love about this process – that the clues start piling up, and the more we talk about this stuff, the more the disparate threads start to weave together from different disciplines and corners of the world. I look forward to this happening more and more.

Interesting that you raise the KLF in your latest blog post, by the way – they’ll come into this story as well…

That said, while music’s not a ’special case’, per se – it does have its own unique characteristics.

I don’t necessarily agree that creativity is the same thing across different disciplines. The kinds of processes, practices and cultural conversations that take place in songwriting are not simply the same processes that are used in pottery, dancing, architecture, graffiti art or academic writing, performance and so on – merely applied differently. I think they’re substantively different categories of activity that we group together as having familial similarities.

I take your point on the legality thing too – but it’s at the level of policy that ‘Music As Culture’ needs to be addressed, because everywhere else, people seem to see these sorts of arguments as reasonable, common sense observations – while copyright law is constructed in such a way as to defeat such prosaic, common sense at the behest of lobbyists for ‘Music As Commerce’, who represent the interests of those who have stockpiled all the sausages and are simply saying “Mine!” like a 2 year-old whenever anyone hungry tries to reason with them.

Appreciate the chance to grapple with these ideas. Cheers.

I was asking your opinion about how far this extended to other fields as it’s not immediately apparent to me how musical works are a special case distinct from other forms of artistic work, or for that matter any form of creativity in not obviously artistic areas such as engineering or medicine.

On further reflection my position is that I agree with and wholeheartedly support your conclusions but don’t feel they stem best from the arguments you’re using to make them. I think that either all creativity is part of a cultural conversation, no matter which field it’s happening in, or it’s not. I also don’t see how the uses to which something can be put have any logical bearing on whether someone is obliged to make it available to us.

If I had to use a food analogy I wouldn’t choose the “Locked ingredient cupboard” idea (as we have to pay for ingredients, and often for the cake), I think I’d go instead for an “Are you going to eat that sausage?” analogy.

If I’ve got something I’m not using and you want it, it’d be simply churlish of me to refuse to give it to you, and completely inappropriate for me to offer to sell it to you. I don’t think you could persuasively argue it’s not mine, but you can very persuasively argue that general levels of happiness will increase if you let me have it.

I think as musicians we should just say: “you’re not using that music, let us try to do something creative with it”, and not try to argue it on the basis of legality, as I’m not sure we’re on our strongest ground there.

Do I think that authors of books are indebted to the authors of the books they’ve read in the past? Absolutely. Do academic works build on the creative endeavours of antecedents? That’s a pre-requisite. Are photographs part of a cultural tradition? Of course.

But whether there’s an industry being effectively incentivised to lock that culture away is another matter. It’s probably true of the film industry. You could definitely make a case for this applying to books and professional photography, though I suspect the parameters and effects would be quite different.

Remixes, mashups, samples, breaks, scratching, loops, mixtapes, DJs, chord progressions, arrangements, playing-along, live performance and related activities that incorporate other musical artifacts probably don’t have easy parallels in other media.

To be honest, I haven’t given it a great deal of thought outside of the music industries, because that’s where my interest specifically lies. You could probably write a much bigger book called ‘Deleting Culture’ – but that’s not what my focus is.

(I’m genuinely interested to know your view, I’m not trying to argue the opposing case and I don’t have an immediate answer myself. )

Cheers.