ABSTRACT
The opening decade of the new millennium, especially the later part, saw a surge of enthusiasm for new digital technologies and the ways in which these enable formerly passive consumers to activate themselves and engage creatively with the culture surrounding them. Music technologies played a substantial role in this phenomenon. Nowadays, any enthusiast can home-record. Sampling and manipulating pre-existing music have become much simpler. Likewise, the distribution of music is no longer difficult and expensive. It is easy and costs next to nothing. As a consequence of these developments, the question how pop music production works no longer has a self-evident answer. There is a widespread debate on the future of pop music culture, which focuses primarily on issues of copyright and intellectual property. Against this backdrop, my research on the online remix community https://ccMixter.org, seeks to offer a different approach by investigating remixing as a cultural practice and drawing upon the notion of analogies as a conceptual tool. First, however, I will describe in more detail the dominant views on the culture of recorded popular music.
