Higher Education, Intellectual Property, and Incubation Mechanisms: The Case of Australia's Indie 100

Philip Graham

doi:10.4324/9781315174754-6

This chapter describes a research and engagement project through which a pedagogy of experience presented itself as a fruitful way forward for teaching creative industries professionalism in higher education (HE) contexts. The project, Indie 100, involved hundreds of local musicians at an annual attempt to create 100 new songs in 100 hours. Following an intense week of music production, the project undertook to promote and commercialise the material over the following 12 months. During the five-year period in which the project ran, its participants-including musicians, students, and industry professionals from throughout Australia and internationally, along with staff from the university that ran the project-formed into numerous and surprising project configurations, many of which resulted in ongoing success. The historical slant of the chapter situates today's young musician within a fast-emerging, post-digital 'handicraft' economy. That is, rather than being simply an industrial hand-solely a maker of musical things-today's musicians will often need to compose, record, stage, produce, release, promote, and manage the copyrights they produce, at least until they can afford to 'outsource' one or more of the functions that add up to a musical living. Or, to put it more simply, today's musicians must make, promote, and sell their music, with all the complications that involves. The recorded music industry is especially perplexing for young artists, in large part because of its intersection with national and international intellectual property (IP) regimes, and with a long corporate influence on the ways in which the act of making a record is understood, both legally and interpersonally. The chapter details the ways in which IP and musical aspirations redound against each other to produce the complex legal relationships involved in any recording. It shows how John Dewey's emphasis on locality provides a basis upon which new understandings of curriculum can emerge in a globalised semiotic environment (which includes the legal, business, and aesthetic environments) dominated by the likes of Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The experience of Indie 100 showed all of us involved how quickly and strangely the informational deluge facilitated by those behemoths has come to challenge the centuries-old 'knowledge monopoly' formerly held by universities and other institutes of higher learning. Rather than continue as brokers of 'sacred' or 'secret' information, our experience of Indie 100 indicates the future for HE, at least in creative industries, is one in which students are guided through high-value, high-stakes, high-profile projects that immerse them in professional networks, professional working circumstances, and professional levels of intensity and engagement.

Higher Education, Intellectual Property, and Incubation Mechanisms: The Case of Australia's Indie 100

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