Mashups

Melanie Beltran

MCS 244

April 29, 2019

Mashups are collaborations between two or more companies or artists. Mashups have consequences for companies and artists. In Henry Jenkins’ “Taking the You Out of YouTube?” it states, “YouTube, along with Second Life, Flickr, Wikipedia, and MySpace, has emerged as one of the key reference points in contemporary digital culture — emblematic of the move towards what people are calling web 2.0. As Newsweek aptly put it last year, web 2.0 is ‘putting we into the web’… What separates these companies from the dotcoms which fueled web 1.0 is the emphasis upon participation, social networking, collective intelligence, call it what you want. What distinguishes them is that their content arises bottom-up from the community of users.” What is beneficial is that fact that the content is various and distinguishes each of the companies from one of another to form a collaborate. In the article, “Grey Album Producer Danger Mouse Explains How He Did It,” it states, “…when he heard Jay-Z was releasing an acapella version of The Black Album for remixers, he came up with a crazy idea to blend it with the Beatles’ famous The White Album and make The Grey Album (see “Remixers Turn Jay-Z’s Black Album Grey, White And Brown”).” The mashup of artists Jay-Z and the Beatles created a musical and memorable song. The mixture of the old and new music appeals to audiences that gravitate to that particular genre of music. In Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick’s “InfoEnclosure 2.0,” it states, “The use of the word ‘supposed’ is noteworthy. As probably the largest collaboratively authored work in history, and one of the current darlings of the internet community, Wikipedia ought to know. Unlike most of the members of the Web 2.0 generation, Wikipedia is controlled by a non-profit foundation, earns income only by donation and releases its content under the copyleft GNU Free Documentation License. It is telling that Wikipedia goes on to say ‘[Web 2.0] has become a popular (though ill-defined and often criticized) buzzword among certain technical and marketing communities.’” Because Wikipedia is controlled by a non-profit organization, anyone can put information on the website and could decide to cite the information or not. It is essentially opened to everyone and anyone. The New Yorker’s  “Sasha Frere-Jones, 1+1+1+1=1 The New Math of Mashups,” it states, “Mashup artists like Vidler, Kerr, and Brown have found a way of bringing pop music to a formal richness that it only rarely reaches. See mashups as piracy if you insist, but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction.” These artists found a way to bring new content to pop genre that has not been seen before in the industry. There are people (not in the music industry) that take music from another artist and creates their own twist to the song. Mashups have created new content and music from companies and artists. Each company and artist has their very own individual content and collabs with others to create something the world hasn’t seen before and will hopefully enjoy.

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