Abstract

As part of an AHRC-funded Beyond Text network project, Charlotte Waelde, along with Philip Schlesinger, Professor of Cultural Policy at Glasgow, carried out a series of interviews with musicians, singers, record producers and performers, all engaged in the music industry. The purpose was to find out what the relationship was between the formalities of copyright and what actually happened in practice in the music industry. Our interviewees mostly had portfolio careers; much as they would have liked their creative work to sustain them financially, most had several different streams of income, the purpose being to support their creative work. We also found that while copyright focuses on the work – or the product of creative efforts, what was really important to participants tended to be the process of creation: this makes policy intervention challenging. This chapter will discuss a number of these findings, placing them alongside many of the current trends in copyright and cultural policymaking and asking whether some of the recent changes to the law in areas such as the identification of a work for the purposes of copyright protection have any impact on the work of the participants in the industry. Keywords: music; copyright; originality; authorship; score; cultural policy.