Convergance Culture And Trends Of Music Sharing Online

Using an illustrative case study from the Web (site, application, event, etc.), analyze and discuss the significance of what Henry Jenkins calls ‘convergence culture’. Make specific reference to two or three of the major areas of tension he identifies as shaping the contemporary media environment.

Significant innovations have occurred across the business or intermediate services sectors and the domestic or consumer service sectors, across the fields of entertainment, communication, and information sharing and the website that I am using for my case study is one of them. Imeem.com is a unique file sharing social networking site where individuals pool their time, experience, wisdom, resources, and creativity to form new information, knowledge, and cultural goods. Drawing from Henry Jenkins work I will focus on how the website is redesigning the digital economy, renegotiating relations between producers and consumers and reengaging the citizens.

In 2007 the four largest record companies in the world Universal, Warner Music Group, Sony BMG and EMI, signing a deal with Imeem allowing the domain to feature content of the artists signed by the record companies legally. Meaning that, Imeem was now the first website whose users had the music industry's blessing, to share music for free in return for a cut of advertising revenues from the website.

It seemed that both Imeem and the music industry had learnt immensely from the Napster incident.

Imeem was founded by Dalton Calwell (ex-VA Linux) and Jan Jannink (formerly of Napster) and many of the core engineers came from the original Napster file sharing service. It maybe for this reason that their is a significant difference between Napster and Imeem. Which is while Imeem only allows you to upload and play music on its website, Napster allowed its users to download songs onto their hard drive.

For the music industry all that the Napster incident accomplished was to drive file-sharing underground where the recording industry couldn't get a cut of the profits. Had they approached Napster in 2000 the way they approached Imeem, they could have been collecting ad revenue from every file-sharing transaction over the last eight years. Instead, they wasted a lot of money on lawsuits, angered a lot of their customers, and ultimately had to concede that music sharing might be OK as long as they get a cut.

For fairly obvious reasons, we usually think of such networks, which began with Napster, as a “problem”.