When I heard the song at the beginning of this lectorial, I thought what a horrible remix.  John Lennon would be turning in his grave if he heard that rubbish.  What right does Jay Z have to use Lennon’s melody and completely destroy it?  The simple answer is money.  Jay Z can afford to buy the rights to almost any song and do an awful remix.  The problem with remixes today in the music industry is that only the wealthy established artists can make and sell them legitimately due to copyright laws.  This restriction limits the amount of artists that can sell remixes to consumers, even though they might have better talent than artists like Jay Z.  In my opinion it doesn’t take much artistic talent to remix a song.  But everyone should be able to have access to remix music material and profit from it rather than just a select few. I agree with the concept put forward to the class that nothing is original.  The fact of the matter is that the big music companies want to keep control, forever protect their assets and constantly delay their material reaching public domain.

Our class then listened to another remix by Girl Talk which is called ‘This is the remix.”  We were given the task to write down the artists we recognised in this song.  I could only name around 5 songs but there were over 20 songs amalgamated in this song.  I would give this remix a lot more credibility than any Jay Z remix but Girl Talk can’t legitimately sell this song to the public.  Why?  The simple answer is money again.  This song has breached copyright laws left, right and centre, but Girl Talk don’t have the capacity to pay the ridiculous amount of money needed to obtain rights to all the songs used in this compilation.  As long as the original artists are attributed to the remix, I don’t have a problem with people mixing songs.  I might hate most remixes but it shouldn’t be limited by the big music companies on who can profit from them.