The reverberations from Bono’s sermon about filesharing earlier in the month continue to be felt. Following our own broadside (interpretted by some as a bitchslap) and a whole host of bloggers and Twitter users airing their views on the U2 frontman, a music entrepreneur has written a guest opinion piece on The Register that shows the music industry is also far from united on the matter.
Paul Sanders doesn’t pull any punches when explaining how the current status quo doesn’t exactly help smaller artists:
“The market, despite all the hot air about Long Tails, has spent the last decade relatively over-rewarding the hits. If ISPs have been leeching cash out of the record business, as Bono contends in another piece of sophistry ("rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business"), then the studies are showing that it is the middle that is being slimmed, leaving a longer thinner tail and almost as fat a head as ever.
“….big companies have every reason to keep things just as they are. That means trying to make sure that consumers spend as much money as possible on as few tracks as possible. So while in the best value deals the wholesale rate per track is hovering around 20p, you are not allowed to buy more at the same price – in fact with Sky Songs the price goes up if you want more than 20 tracks per month.
“So perversely, if the pain of filesharing is felt disproportionately outside of the hits market, then the biggest companies have no reason to swap what they have now for a market that would give the smaller labels more chances to get paid.”
And it’s not just Paul Sanders who disagrees with Bono. We spoke to musician/blogger/teacher Steve Lawson about Paul’s Register piece, who said:
“I think the piece in The Register was a fairly typical piece by someone in his position – rightly calling Bono up on the nonsense he’s talking, but still buying into the idea that the ideal endgame is a subscription model that would ultimately still lead to a gross inequity in the distribution of that money (how on earth is ‘usage’ going to be tracked in order to distribute the money fairly?).
“I find the lack of foresight in the thinking of the record industry baffling – I guess it’s because they are resolutely thinking of themselves as the ‘record industry’ not the ‘music industry’ and even more so as an ‘industry’ rather than as some kind of conduit for culture.”
I’m not very well qualified to propose solutions to helping the music industry’s business model – our views are entirely based around seeing that our customers’ interests are looked after – but it’s clear that not all musicians feel the same way about filesharing. For example, Canadian singer-songwriter Dan Mangan has joined the likes of Shakira, Norah Jones and Nelly Furtado in saying that filesharing isn’t necessarily evil:
"I don’t mind people sharing my music, if downloading or pirating a digital format of a song brings someone to a gig and then they have a real face to face, human interaction, maybe they bring a friend, maybe they buy a t-shirt, that’s great for me. "Even though the music industry has changed so much and people are buying less CD’s, I refuse to believe that people don’t want to support art that they believe in."
Like I say, we’re not here to propose how musicians can earn a fair crust (and we don’t condone illegal filesharing), but with the Digital Economy Bill ignoring the realities of the situation, it’s clear to me that trying to disconnect alleged filesharers simply isn’t a solution for the music industry’s wider problems.
Others seem to agree with me – in fact, some have come up with some pretty creative ways of getting the message across as part of our Sing Our Petition competition.
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Jonathan Jaeger
I’m currently reading Anderson’s “The Long Tail”, so this was an interesting article to read in light of that. I also agree that if someone downloads an artist’s music, particularly one they really like, they can somehow return the favor by going to a concert and/or buying some merch. Actually most artists would prefer the merch sale since they make a lot more of that than record sales.