Right symptom, wrong diagnosis: Lily Allen on music piracy

Lily Allen has made the headlines talking about the impact of filesharing on the music industry - but while she recognises the symptoms she really is pointing to the wrong diagnosis...

(The original post has dropped off her blog.. but it's widely quoted - like here at the Times...)

In her blog in an article targetting the Featured Artist Coalition opposition to stricter measures against filesharers she complains that new musicians are finding times hard...

Quoting...
"The coalition also says that file sharing is good because it “means a new generation of fans for us”. This is great if you are a big artist at the back end of your career with albums to flog to a new audience, but emerging artists don’t have this luxury."
..and further on
"They (music executives)have been complacent about new technology and spent all the money on their own fat salaries, not industry development. As they start really to lose out from piracy, they’re not slashing their salaries, they’re cutting what they invest in A&R (artists & repertoire). A&R people won’t have the funds to take risks, which again makes British music Cowell puppets."

New artists struggling, artists with back catalogs doing nicely thank you, and record companies unwilling to take risks are precisely what you expect - not from piracy - but from the structural change that online digital music has made to the business.  New artists compete not just with their contemporaries but with every artist ever released.  Back catalog sales suck sales from new artists, and record companies get better returns selling old tracks than developing new talent. 

Lost sales to piracy are hypothetical...  (no one really thinks a teenager would cough up another $800 for all the downloaded tracks on their mp3 player do they? ) Competition from millions of back catalog tracks is  real and the key element that puts new music at risk. (Why total music sales are dropping is a different question for another post)

Two things are needed...

• Musicians.  Stop expecting record companies to discover you and market you.  The internet gives you direct access to the public... 
• Cut copyright terms. Hard.  The only thing that will persuade the industry to invest more in new talent is to take away the crutch of a fat back catalog and focus them on finding new music and artists to promote.  Copyright is supposed to promote creativity not stifle it....

 More on Why it doesn't pay to be a musician.

Piratpartiet & The Pirate Party -  Working for copyright reform

The light dawns. Artists speak out.

There's a really interesting piece in the Guardian today that's picked up by both HAX and Michael Geist. It covers vocal opposition by artists groups in the UK to recent government proposals to retable 'three strikes' and internet bans for persistent filesharers.

The article is interesting on a number of levels...

Firstly it's welcome to see artists coming down on the side of their public and opposing the demonising of non-commercial sharing - and the equally welcome conclusion that sterner legislation is not the answer.

Secondly, it highlights the changing balance of power between artists and distributors (the record companies) which it attributes to the falling value of recorded music - You could see it another way too... with reproduction and distribution on the Internet being so cheap (free...?) the value of a distributor disappears - not just the value of the product.

Thirdly, it highlights evidence that tour revenues are up significantly - showing that there is healthy interest in seeing live music and real sources of income for bands in doing what musicians do - make music.

The recording industry meanwhile are cast in their traditional role.... in full support of the government proposals... while trying to lock in their artists to '360 degree' deals to take their slice of artists income from tours and other promotions. No one likes losing control.....

Last but not least of course, its great to see the insights of the mainstream press beginning to see the music industry in the same light as The Pirate Party and Piratpartiet. The internet makes it all but free to distribute all forms of 'digital' culture. Businesses need to adapt to that new reality. You can't put the genie back in the bottle - and legislating to protect outmoded ways of doing business is not the answer - not least when it means private policing and infringing peoples rights to privacy in the process.

Featured Artist Manifesto

Searching round for something else I found a news article I'd missed on the launch of the Featured Artist Coalition - a trade and lobby group set up to lobby for artists rights within the music industry. The groups premise is that featured artists - the main name on the cover - are what sell music, but that artists in fact get a bad deal from the music companies and that no-one is representing artists interests as the industry moves into the digital age. (You might wonder what the musician's union has been doing for the last fifty years?)

While viewpoints can differ on what are sensible limits for copyright I find a lot to sympathise with in their manifesto:

• artists rights should be licensed not assigned - meaning artists keep rights to their work
• licensing should be fixed term and lapse back to the artist
• artists should get paid on the same terms as songwriters (who get paid whenever their work is played in a cinema showing for instance)
• copyright owners should be obliged to 'use it or lose it' preventing work being lost to the public (with consequent loss of earnings for the artist)

Last but not least they also support a key plank of Piratpartiet's policy on copyright - that it should not be a criminal act to share music for non commercial use. They specifically distance themselves from the music industry making villains of their customers.

As a lobby organisation they will have two things working in their favour... first that they are fronted by a number of well known pop celebrities including Billy Bragg, Jools Holland, David Gray, and the amazing Annie Lennox (The clip is there in sympathy for all those used and abused artists.. ;-)

The second is that membership is a mere 5% of an artists UK performing rights income - which should give them a healthy warchest to lobby from. (That was 5% tax deductable so the tax payer will be paying for a chunk of their lobbying activities... which goes a bit against the grain).

Footnote: They estimate an average artist would pay a few hundred pounds a year - equivalent to about £8000 gross income. Most artists dont make enough to live on then......