Recently in Music Technology-Matt Johnson Category

I've moved my topic to narrow it a little bit more. I'm going to focus on the peer to peer file sharing companies versus the music industry and how the music industry wants to shut down those sites. I will try to argue that the object of the peer to peer sites is a good one and that illegal music sharing that occurs is not actually as harmful to the companies as they would have us believe.

    The Internet is often thought of as a negative technology when it comes to music and the music industry. Downloading music and pirating are two of the biggest concerns on the minds of anti-internet music lovers. However, as the music industry evolved and begun to really discover what popular culture wanted from music, the producers and record labels began taking advantage of artists and the music they wanted to play. Music today has largely become a week-by-week fad change...

I need some help finding some more sources for my topic. I'm still not positive how I'm going to narrow it down, but I'm going to go the route of the effect of the internet on the music business and try to argue that pirating is actually having a more positive effect on the music business. I'll have to find a good strategy for arguing that and I can probably do even better with the thesis but thats what I have for now.

I'm thinking about changing the focus of my topic to something more like:
The internet and progress in communication technologies has often been considered a bad thing for popular music and the music business, while in fact it has had a beneficial effect for independent artists and created a more diverse musical culture.
What are your thoughts on this topic?

Thesis: The advance of musical technologies has caused people with unique musical talent to be thrust into the backdrop of popular musical culture.

    Based on Marx's claims and arguments in his essay, "Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?" I believe that Marx would find my thesis to be a good example of what he wants to emphasize....
    Winner would probably want me to think about whether or not it is truly the technology to blame or actually the situations in which the technologies were developed...