Summit 2015, Austin TX
Monday & Tuesday, March 23-24, 2015
Session 10: Tuesday 11:30 IPO Room
Moderator: Ken Ashdown
David Maddox
Assistant Professor
Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business, Belmont University
Rush Hicks
Assistant Professor
Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business, Belmont University
Defending "Prop Me Up By The Jukebox (If I Die)", a Case Study of Copyright Infringement
From a “Boy Named
Sue” to The “Gambler,” Country Music has had its share of colorful
disputes. “Prop Me Up By the Jukebox (If I Die),” also known as Everett
A. Ellis v. Joe Diffie, et al, 177 F. 3d 503 (1999), is a interesting
example of how professional songwriters and a music publisher/record
producer defended themselves in a copyright infringement case. This
case is useful to instructors and students because it turned on the
doctrines of independent creation, the “ordinary listener” test, and
based on the cassette-tape songwriting sessions of the writers of “Prop
Me Up.”
Paul S. Linden
Associate Professor & Sequence Head, Recording Industry Program
School of Mass Communication & Journalism
The University of Southern Mississippi
From Ethnic to Epic: Translating Race and Genre in the Music Business
The growth of rock ’n
roll, reggae, rap and salsa demonstrates the semantic instability of
“race” and “musical genre” as interpretive categories. Translation is
employed as a methodological concept allowing for semantic analysis of
musical forms as they pass through geographical, social and economic
contexts. Because music conveys the same “discursive instability”
attributed to race (Radano and Bohlman 2000), the use of translation to
mark shifts in geographical, economic and semantic contexts may be
evaluated positively or negatively. In most cases, it results in the
creation of new and larger audiences. However, the issue of translating
a musical genre from the context of its native community across
corporate structures such as record labels or other mass distribution
platforms reveals significant pitfalls in articulation. The study
discovers systematic, hidden costs of mainstream success including the
alienation of core fan bases as well as artists’ loss of both creative
control and authorship. The careers of Elvis Presley and Bob Marley
exemplify the movement of popular music forms into the American
mainstream. These figures allow readers to mark semantic shifts of
their respective genres as they migrate from provincial communities
across corporate structures such as record labels and mass distribution
platforms like radio and television.