Betty Who and Tove Lo add a hefty amount of strong female pop to the chart, but it’s UK newcomer Martin Luke Brown who leads the week’s debuts with a top-ten entry for “Nostalgia.” Grizfolk, The Lone Bellow, and Karmin also chart return entries.
Kurt Trowbridge
Building bridges between music, web development, and social media.
The chart returns for the first time since September and Christina Perri’s “Human” at the top. Tracks from Karmin, Peter Thomas featuring Betty Who, John Legend, and Céline Dion & Ne-Yo filling out the rest of the top five, with previous #1 “Further Away (Romance Police)” by Lissie at #11.
These are one hundred songs that stayed in my heavy rotation throughout 2013. In a year that saw personal advancements including eight weeks studying abroad in France and graduation from college, these songs soundtracked my year, each song appealing to me through instrumentation, lyrics, or just its overall mood. Read on for descriptions of each track, access the whole playlist on SoundCloud to listen, and judge away.
Continue reading “Kurt’s 100 Favorite Songs of 2013”
For an abridged version of this paper, see this page.
Though the practice of covering previously-performed songs has been prevalent in music history for several decades, many new artists looking to build their profiles in the modern music industry release cover songs by currently popular artists, often putting a unique spin on their performance in order to showcase their stylistic originality and also gain the interest of fans to support their careers. However, copyright laws are a problematic issue that many artists must face in order to legally release and sometimes profit from their reworked cover versions. Artists need to be aware of copyright laws when posting and selling covers to ensure that they are working within the law, but when done successfully, they can use cover songs as an effective method of building a fanbase and boosting their musical career. This paper will analyze and critique the current copyright system and how it relates to song covers, particularly those that are posted and released through the video-sharing website YouTube. After an introduction covering the history and variants of cover songs, a deeper analysis of copyright law on YouTube and in the music industry will follow, along with case studies of how they can both help and hinder artistic creativity for developing artists using YouTube as a platform for which to promote their music careers.
Continue reading “The Right to Copy: Cover Songs and Copyright on YouTube”
The top five is unchanged, though Graffiti6, Kelly Clarkson, and Karmin each move into the top ten. Florence + The Machine has another top twenty hit this year as “No Light, No Light” debuts at #17.