Origional or Reproduced? Produsage.

I am driving home from university listening to the radio in my car. A song comes on that draws my attention and I want to see the video clip. So when I get home I jump on the computer and type in youtube.com. I search the artist and song name and countless altered clips pop up; aniture remixes and home made video clips. Anyone who has access to the internet has the ability to consume media, change it slightly, and reproduce it.




Culture jamming is a perfect example of produsage. Adbusters take existing, well known advertisments and alter them slightly to change the message, but the addressee still associates the advertisment with the big name brand. Their aim in this process is to tranish the big brand name such as McDonalds or Absolute Vodka. However, it may be agrued that by culture jamming these brands, they are also providing some free advertising for them. As they say, any publicity is good publicity.

There is money to be made out of produsage; rapper and produser Kanye West is the perfect example of this. In songs such as 'gold digger' and 'stronger' he has taken a popular hook from a song, changed it slightly and "prodused' hit songs. About 2 years ago i attended a Kanye West concert and before playing gold digger, he palyed the Ray Charls origional. I think i was the only one in the audience singing the oriogional song at the top of my lungs, everyone else looked confused.

The process of produsage could be argued as others building on an idea to make it better. Although i dont know weather the origional produser would apprecte it. I dont know wheather I would call produsage creative, but i think is it definatly a smart thing to do. If you know something works, why not benifit?