Mechanical Reproduction

As we could all agree, the music industry is not the same as it was before. And it may never be.

Mechanical royalties from music recordings are currently experiencing a clean fall down the cliff faster than sales on digital formats or vinyl could save, forcing traditional record companies, which was once the most reliable form of financing for musicians, transform into 360 degree services in order to keep themselves in the game, while artists look forward to live industries on picking up the responsibility of feeding the artists. After a decade of fighting against piracy and continuing efforts to enforce copyright laws, you could still find the albums you want online, when sometimes the search is even auto completed for the user in Google’s

How did technology dominate the music industry and shape the current music scene, and how could we analyze the appearance to recognize the real challenge?

I would like to bring up an article written by Walter Benjamin called "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", which I think provides valuable insights on attempts to analyze and understand the interrelation of technological and artistic development, and how it affects the value of original artworks.

In the article, Walter Benjamin engages in an intriguing dialectical analysis of the manner in which twentieth-century technology has affected how art is produced, distributed, and consumed. First of all, he argues that by displacing artwork from “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”, the mechanical reproduction can destroy the “aura” of the original artwork, which also destroys the value of the artwork under capitalism. He also points out that there is a crucial distinction between “manual reproduction,” which actually reinscribes the authenticity of the original work by virtue of its secondary status as a forgery, and “technical reproduction”, which disrupts and challenges all concepts of authenticity, as the original work of art is lost in all the infinite identical prints of