A criminal speaks
I dragged myself out of bed this morning to the sound of Andy Burnham, Culture Secretary, telling me that illegal filesharing is wrong and that 6 of the biggest UK ISPs will now be spying on us on behalf of the government to help put an end to it.
Well, I for one am not reassured by a Culture Secretary who thinks that criminalising music fans is a positive move towards encouraging culture to flourish. Of course, I believe that musicians should be paid for ‘services rendered’, but why are fans always seen as the problem when it’s record companies who are responsible for the situation?
Research has long shown that people are prepared to pay for digital music if it’s an easy service to use. How else would iTunes and Emusic flourish? However, these services are by no means perfect – a result of record companies floundering for almost a decade about how to deal with changes in technology. They can’t sort licensing agreements, they can’t cope with ‘non-music’ companies like Apple, they stuff around with DRM/copy protection all the time. Hell, they don’t even seem to understand how people buy or listen to music these days. Music fans should not be penalised because major labels are still living in the dark ages and cannot figure out how to sell digital music.
Andy Burnham has suggested that in the long term there should be a yearly levy of £20 – £30 pounds to cover music downloading. Great, but based on the track record of record companies in this area, I’m not holding my breath.
Having said all that, I tend to view music file sharing on blogs as a form of home taping. It’s about both sharing a passion for music and discovering things you might not have heard otherwise. And believe me, since my father’s first illegal home taping of the family’s Beatles and Elton John records for me at age 5, the music industry has made a killing out of me. If Andy Burnham wants proof that, despite what he thinks, filesharing does actually ‘support the creative industries’ then he should look at my bank balance.
Tags: half-baked conjecture
July 24th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
I find it almost impossible to find any sympathy for record companies. They are basically banks, not quite creative enviroments they allude to, and run by the same schemers and weasels who for years, knowing they had a captive audience, would sell a box set ie – Beatles, Floyd, Kate Bush, Queen -for around the £100 mark (this is in the early 90s too) so collectors and fans would have to dig deep for perhaps an albums worth of outtakes that weren’t good enough to release first time round. Followed by endless reformats coloured vinyl, cassette, CD Deluxe Editions, as a way of wringing out every last penny.
These are the same nitwits that backed Robbie Williams (whose career was going cold in the UK and nowhere internationally) to the tune of £80 million.
No stuff ‘em – instead of getting in Chicken Little flap crying the sky’s falling in they need work out why?
Most of the music I upload is paid for by me, and if I like something I hear elsewhere – I usually buy it.
July 24th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
It is all very complicated as I am happy for my money to go to the artist who made it but it seldom does. Fergal Sharkey on the same programme point out that majority of aritist get less than £5000 in royalities.
I also think there is sea change and people like us who have always bought records buy downloads and cd’s and old vinyl younger people don’t. I have number of nephews all with ipods full of tunes none of which have been bought they expect it to be free. I don’t know how we get round this when we taped things off the radio we still shelled out £1 for cassette, most of the filesharers aren’t paying for broad band etc. I can’t see a subscription fee working wth this age range as for instance their phones are pays as you go they just don’t wnat tos pend money on tunes.
As for up loading songs I nearly always only upload rare or obscure songs i reckon people can find newer ones elsewhere. I’m not sure this is consistent, but the flow of traffic to my sight sadly won’t bring down even the smallest indie record firms!
July 24th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
It is indeed very difficult.
Record companies have been as you say, Mr Mondo, very good at fleecing customers for years. As a fan you do feel somewhat exploited, with little sympathy for them. And now, as Mr BLTP points out, lots of younger people feel that music should be free.
And maybe it should. Bob Lefsetz is always saying that live music and merchandising are where you make the money these days – records are just an ad for these channels. If and when CDs and records don’t exist anymore, maybe free music is the answer and the price of gig tickets will just go up even more.
But I’m just a consumerist at heart who likes to own the physical product. I still buy new vinyl for chrissakes! All the stuff on this site is from the records that I’ve bought and I resent the accusation that I am doing wrong.
July 25th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
I sometimes worry that we’re living in an Internet golden age at the moment – rather like the golden age of British radio during the pirate era of the sixties.
The problem with the legal action record companies have taken against people so far is that it has been utterly illogical and indiscrimate, and as such has infuriated me so much that I no longer really want to give them my cash anyway. One YouTube user I’ve been in periodic correspondence with had his account disabled for including a two-and-a-half minute snippet of an eighties act as part of a Chart Show episode upload. The reasoning behind this move made absolutely no sense – did the lawyer actually assume that people would listen to the fragment of the tune he’d left rather than buy it, or (more likely) simply download an illegal copy in full elsewhere?
I’ll only upload real obscurities on to my blog, which will almost always be completely out of print. However, that doesn’t make me safe, rather sadly, nor indeed anybody else who takes the same approach. And the new declarations are a bit worrying.
July 25th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
It’s a farce really. As you say Cocktails, what you, I or Mondo do is a little like home taping, which as any fool knows keeps music alive. At worst, it’s completely harmless. It’s not even like you can download the tracks I put up, but I doubt that would stop me from being branded a thief.
I’m not even remotely bothered about it to be honest. Technically speaking, when I let my brother borrow a CD, or leave my window open while I play something on my hifi, I’m breaking the law.
As for mass file sharing, it is, as you state, a symptom of the arrogance and intransigence of the music industry.
July 25th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
23Daves, is this the internet golden age? Good question. I’d like to think that it will always be difficult to control and patol the internet, but you never know. In any case, the flipside of the golden age theory is that this must also be the golden age of porn and spam.
Lots of tracks that I put on here are available by legal channels (although I don’t generally put download links in for new music). If anything, I’ll stop doing it because I hate rude people who just link to my downloads from their own sites. The music on here is for the people who read this blog (or alternatively you could say, the price of the music is putting up with my associated witterings!)
Ill Man, Yes you are breaking the law playing music with the window open. Surely, you need to apply for a music license from the PRS…
July 25th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Already done it! Just to be safe, you understand………… ;)
Wouldn’t want to be caught doing anything that might put those plucky, downtrodden, under-payed entertainment multi-nationals at a financial disadvantage, would I?
Don’t you know we’re heading for a recession?