Blog #4

The music industry attempted to curb illegal downloading and file sharing by a number of ways. Phone companies such as Verizon and AT&T helped the music industry by sending their customers “copyright alert”, warning letters and slowing the downloading process.     Rock and Roll had a huge influence on racism and youth culture.  Black music, art and literature helped break racism between blacks and whites. During the rock and roll age, artists would show their feminine and masculine side to challenge the rules of how they should behave onstage. For example, Elvis used inappropriate movements of his hips while he was performing.

          Pop music remains powerful today due to T.V. shows such as Americal Idol and Glee because 
      these shows are very popular. They also bring back the older songs in the past so older pop songs        are still played today.The company who is more in control of the worldwide music  production   and distribution is Apple’s iTunes. ITunes has raised their price per song but still   sell 38.2% of music in the U.S..   

         I believe the internet helps musical artists because today’s world is more digital.  I think if musical artists are online the artist will become more popular and get more fans because more people can hear their music on different websites they use.  Artists might not like the idea of internet because they don’t make as much profit off of it if they were to sell CD’s but they would get more fans if they were to put their music online. The development of the telegraph was very important in media history because it lead to further inventions. However, the telegraph couldn’t do mych when it was first invented because it could only give out codes but not the human voice. The telegraph helped lead to the inventions of the telephone and the wireless telephone which then lead to the radio.

        Broadcasting became federally regulated because of the tragic Titanic event. After the Titanic sank, congress had to pass a radio act which meant that people had to get a license to transmit radio waves. Years ago media companies could only own a certain amount of AM and FM radio channels. The 1996 act made these changes and allowed people to own many radio channels as they would like but had to follow certain rules.  For a large area, companies could own more station s in that area. For areas where there were only about fourteen and lower channels, radio companies could only own up to five stations. In the small areas where there are only a very few channels, companies couldn’t own more than half of the stations.  Today,  a broadcasting company, clear channel, owns 886 radio stations and 140 channels internationally.  Clear channel is not only on normal radio but they also have internet radio stations as well. The government encouraged monopoly, which is when a private company would get the government’s approval to rule the entire radio. The reason why they wanted to do expand American technology worldwide.