How has music copyright changed?

Answer 1

Besides the slow (but obvious) changes in the law, technology has caused the most significant changes in music copyright. When copyright first arose, the only music "recording" technology was notation: the famous story of Mozart visiting the Sistine Chapel and transcribing the Allegri Miserere from memory afterward? That was as close as anyone in the 18th century ever got to Napster.

That's why the development of the player piano was a big deal; it more or less spawned ASCAP as composers saw they had a need to be worried about being remunerated for the duplication, distribution, and performance of their materials. Prior to that, if you wanted to hear an Irving Berlin song, you either bought tickets for a performance (probably produced by Irving Berlin), or you bought the sheet music and played it yourself.

Next came recordings, which made it even easier to hear a song--many, many times, and only paying for it once. Radio led to the founding of BMI, and copyright law was updated to make recordings subject to the same fees as piano rolls (which is why they're called mechanical licenses).

All of this sounds comparatively quaint in this day and age, because digital distribution is so very different from sheet music and piano rolls that it's hard to see they're related at all. The biggest differences, really, are that a digital copy doesn't suffer degradation like an analog copy (repeatedly copying a .doc file won't get speckled and blurry like repeatedly photocopying a piece of paper), and digital distribution is practically free compared to, for example, pressing an album, printing a cover, assembling, shrink-wrapping, and shipping. Beyond that, it's not much different from Mozart transcribing Allegri.

In this sense, it's not so much that copyright has changed, it's that it's being applied to different things in different ways.

That being said, there is one very notable way in which the relationship between music and copyright has changed: sampling.

Back in the day, composers were constantly "borrowing" from each other, and using little stolen bits and pieces as the basis for something entirely new. Over the past 30 years, the notion of sampling (particularly in rap and hip-hop) has gone from a way of doing business to a way of practically guaranteeing you'll be sued.

Answer 2

Music copyright has changed in several ways over the years. One significant change is the length of copyright protection, which has been extended multiple times. Additionally, digital technology and the internet have introduced new challenges in terms of unauthorized sharing and streaming of music, leading to increased enforcement efforts by copyright holders. There has also been a shift towards more licensing and streaming models, as opposed to traditional sales of physical media.