MC Hammer supports the remix culture

Headlines about the RIAA and other groups suing individual consumers for remixing copyrighted content are common. This headline from today’s USA Today Money section, “’90s star MC Hammer taps Net’s social networks to promote new album,” bucks that trend. Instead of trying to prosecute young people for remixing pop culture a la ccMixter, the Hammer thinks it is great if kids want to remix his vibes. Kevin Maney, the article’s author, writes:

This is interesting, too, because the major labels recently launched a campaign to quash exactly that kind of thing. Teens have been making videos of themselves lip-synching or dancing to popular songs and uploading the videos to the Internet. The music industry, once again looking like a bully, says it has to protect its copyrights. Hammer is looking at the same practice and calling it marketing.

“If some kid is taking my song and dancing to it and uploading the video, he’s saying that’s part of his life,” says Hammer, who is not signed to a record label and owns all the rights to his new songs. “How can that not be good?”

On another part of Hammer’s Orkut site, he has set up Look University, tied to a handful of his new songs that are about social issues. This is where Skype and its Skypecasts, which can let a user host 100 other Skype users in a giant conference call, come in. Hammer plans to host Skypecasts about issues such as inner-city murder rates, using the songs as an entry point.

Hammer is encouraging kids to post their videos using his songs to YouTube and Revver, according to the article. Of course this is a ploy to increase his fan-base, but what musician can be faulted for that? I think it is very interesting to see a pop star take a view so contrary to the old-media mindset. Who knows? Maybe this will pay off for the Hammer? I tend to think that those who embrace change and try to surf the wave, rather than attempting to build a wall and stop the tide, have the more realistic approach in the dynamic environment in which we live. I think the Hammer is on the right track, but he needs to publish his stuff formally with a Creative Commons license permitting remixing!

I also think it is great that the Hammer is wanting to use his music as an entry point to engage young people in conversations about really important issues that matter, like poverty and crime. Those are not conversations you typically see music pop artists engaging in with fans, especially if the focus is on ADDRESSING and SOLVING problems, rather than just singing and dancing about them.

Unfortunately, I missed the Skypecast this evening that the Hammer was having about this very article in USA Today. Is this guy on top of current technology or what? Check out the Hammer’s blog for more upcoming interaction opportunities!

If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, subscribe to Wes’ free newsletter. Check out Wes’ video tutorial library, “Playing with Media.” Information about more ways to learn with Dr. Wesley Fryer are available on wesfryer.com/after.

On this day..

• Amazing Animated Space Films: Wanderers and New Horizons – 2015
• Lessons Learned Publishing to Lulu, Amazon and the Apple iBookStore (July 2014) – 2014
• Two Rising Stars In Africa: eLearning and the Kuali ERP – 2013
• Kobo eBook Reader from Borders – 2011
• John Medina’s #iste11 Keynote on YouTube: Brain Rules – 2011
• Critical thinking is more important than ever amidst Internet-based denier propaganda – 2010
• Streaming Netflix videos in the car over 3G – 2009
• U.S. Economy: A car wreck in slow motion – 2009
• links for 2008-07-05 – 2008
• Capturing offline copies of YouTube videos – 2007