The UK’s creative industries and artists have been discussing file-sharing in public recently. Ever since business secretary Lord Mandelson outlined his plan to bring in legislation similar to the Eircom/IRMA agreement here to boot off file-sharers after three warnings, musicians have been writing letters and blog posts about the issue. The problem though is that no-one can agree on anything.
As part of the FAC (Featured Artists Coalition), a team of musicians including Billy Bragg, Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason and Blur’s Dave Rowntree have criticised Mandelson’s plans with Mason quoted as saying “The last thing we want to be doing is going to war with our fanbase. File-sharing means a new generation of fans for us”.
As pointed out though by Lily Allen on her myspace blog , that’s all well and good for established artists like Pink Floyd, Radiohead and Blur but what about emerging artists? Allen’s thoughts are perhaps more realistic as they reflect a more recent successful artist who knows she’s lucky to have paid off her record company advance. Ms. Allen also quite rightly reasons that as record company bosses “start to lose big from piracy, they’re not slashing their salaries - they’re pulling what they invest in A&R,” meaning less room for development and less room for new acts. Her blog sparked replies from both Matt Bellamy of Muse and James Blunt, neither who agreed with her point of view entirely. Allen has since set up a blog at http://idontwanttochangetheworld.blogspot.com to post her fellow artists reactions to her post (which she’s now deleted due to insulting comments).
Ultimately, the problem as I see it, is that the youth of today have been using file-sharing sites and programs adeptly for nigh-on ten years with reprimand. When you’ve been downloading music for free since you were 12 years old, why would you suddenly start paying for it now?
Services like Spotify are brilliant and all but young people largely aren’t willing to use their parent’s credit card to pay for a subscription when they can get the ad-supported version for free or download the MP3 for nothing. Most young people don’t care about copyright or how artists make a living. How can musicians change listening habits when they spend more time bickering amongst themselves?
Deep down, we all know artists have to be paid for their creativity but how continues to be a perplexing and wildly divisive issue. The seeds of free have already been sown but the younger generations will not give it up easily.
September 25th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Good article
FAC seem to be more about having a gripe with record labels that in the past have taken a way too big a cut of the artists profits. so this begs the question why did these artists sign with these major labels in the first place? they are all very well known established artists now after being built up by major labels over decades, its easy for radiohead to say filesharing is good, if they were just starting out on the toilet circuit woiuld be interesting to see if they felt the same?
But the genie is out of the bottle, and free mp3 downloading is not going away no matter how many people are banned from uploading files etc, and also ISPs banning people is really unenforcable. Alot of these new business models being pushed concern the artist doing a lot of the donkey work in the past the record label would do. ….marketing the record, organise the tour, sort out the publishing etc…so now instead of making music the artist has to clog up his/her time with all these issues, surely the label should be doing that? and alot of young artists would have no clue to organise a tour etc..
Those swedish morons piratebay and their followers are confusing two issues. copyright and net freedoms. Sure no-one wants the web to be policed, BUT also no-one wants the idea of creative copyright to be eroded for the artist. some kid downloads gigs of free mp3s and then wonders why his mate and him cant get a record deal………thats because all the labels have gone out of business. It devalues the worth of music and creativity.
Musicians unions are strong in the uk, they need to join ranks, decide what they want to achieve and lay the ground work for it.
September 25th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
and it seems they have started to support each other;
http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?storycode=1038756
September 25th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
I like Popjustice’s plan
http://www.popjustice.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4077&Itemid=206
September 25th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
yeah that ‘bell end’ register one should do the trick !
September 28th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
“(which she’s now deleted due to insulting comments). ”
No. She deleted it because it was pointed out to her that she was a hypocrite. She was complaining about copyright infringement whilst at the same time plagiarising online articles and hosting mixtapes of copyrighted music on the website. Rather than accept her wrongdoing, she decided to try and delete all evidence of it.
The biggest problem facing emerging artists is obscurity. File-sharing sites can get your name out to the other side of the world for free, something you can’t get from the labels.
The three-strikes plan has been rejected three times in the EU parliament and has been called unconstitutional by the highest legal authority in France, citing how it infringes on people’s freedom of speech as guaranteed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.
This latest plan probably comes out of a EMI/Sony/Warner/Universal boardroom full of sycophants who haven’t actually stopped to think about it for a minute. Sure, kicking file-sharers off the net sounds good to them. But why on Earth should a company have the authority to police the web just because of copyright issues? There are huge sections of a user’s Internet service that have nothing to do with the labels’ copyright. Why on Earth should they be able to cut someone off of that?
Three-strikes will not actually get any more money into artists’ pockets.
What we need is a solution like that proposed by the EFF since 2003 http://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing
It allows for the use and development of new and exciting file-sharing technologies whilst paying artists. Win-win. It’s also being supported by the Green Party http://iwouldntsteal.net/support.htm and the Songwriters’ Association of Canada http://www.songwriters.ca/studio/proposal.php
October 5th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Good article
FAC seem to be more about having a gripe with record labels that in the past have taken a way too big a cut of the artists profits. so this begs the question why did these artists sign with these major labels in the first place? they are all very well known established artists now after being built up by major labels over decades, its easy for radiohead to say filesharing is good, if they were just starting out on the toilet circuit woiuld be interesting to see if they felt the same?
But the genie is out of the bottle, and free mp3 downloading is not going away no matter how many people are banned from uploading files etc, and also ISPs banning people is really unenforcable. Alot of these new business models being pushed concern the artist doing a lot of the donkey work in the past the record label would do. ….marketing the record, organise the tour, sort out the publishing etc…so now instead of making music the artist has to clog up his/her time with all these issues, surely the label should be doing that? and alot of young artists would have no clue to organise a tour etc..
Those swedish morons piratebay and their followers are confusing two issues. copyright and net freedoms. Sure no-one wants the web to be policed, BUT also no-one wants the idea of creative copyright to be eroded for the artist. some kid downloads gigs of free mp3s and then wonders why his mate and him cant get a record deal………thats because all the labels have gone out of business. It devalues the worth of music and creativity.
Musicians unions are strong in the uk, they need to join ranks, decide what they want to achieve and lay the ground work for it.