Media Meditation 5

Mashed Up and Spit Out

Music has always been a big part of my life. However, over the last year or so, and especially in my time here in college, it has grown immensely. One thing that I have learned that I loved is mashups. I talked about something in one of my earlier posts called Youtube Poop. Mashups are the Youtube Poop of the audio world. A producer will take two or more tracks and mash them together into a song. One thing that distances this from the YTP world is that mashups are often sold as part of a release by the artist. This creates a whole new headache to do with copyright laws, as while samples are often used in the hip-hop world, these are often made entirely from existing material, with nothing new added by the creator besides how they mix.

Some examples: (Language Content Warning)



This is a great example of how people have adapted to the new media landscape to create and sell what they create. Alot of the artists who mashups are not even necessarily signed, they use social networking to spread the word of their releases and sell them. Without facebook, and myspace and youtube and twitter, they would be hard-pressed to reach their fans. I found these through other people and thats how just about everybody who doesnt directly know the artist finds out.

In addition, I just find the concept of how the music itself has become an instrument of sorts fascinating. The people who create these songs add nothing that wasn't there before. All they do is take existing content and modify it, and mash it together. Yet, it is really somthing new. I heard, for instance, a mashup of NIN's "Bite the Hand that Feeds" and the well known "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. All it was was an instrumental of NIN with an acapella of Astley over top of it, but it was definitely a new song. It was more than just the sum of its parts. This is what is possible in a world where all the media is there to be played with.