The Digital Economy Bill And Ben Weinman On The Music Industry

As you probably know I’ve been going on about Piracy and the MASSIVELY ridiculous extreme web laws that Peter Mandelson has been trying to sneak through for a while. I have been following the story quite closely and asking people to join the fight against it, well now it would seem they are pushing harder to get the dodgy bill through, even though as well as the major ISP’s being against it, pretty much everyone in the world is against it except the record companies, who have Mandelson in their scummy pockets.

So please please please go to this site which will allow you to send an e-mail to your local MP asking him to oppose the bill. It is all automated and the e-mail is written for you (you can change it however you want though) it will take no more than 2 minutes and it does get a reaction as I have been contacted twice by my local MP about it (not automated replies either…)

The record companies do not have a clue about how to survive in this new digital age and instead of trying to adapt they are making Governments, who don’t understand the internet either, create new laws that do not make any sense and will inevitably lead to prosecutions for the innocent record buying public and they won’t actually help the music industry or stop piracy at all.

Not everyone is being so ridiculous about piracy and what the music industry is doing, I read this interview earlier on Wired.co.uk with Ben Weinman from The Dillinger Escape Plan, about how technology has helped him and how record sales are not that important any more. It shows there is a way to do what you love for a living, it takes hard work and passion though.

So how does a band so deliberately challenging stay alive when even conventional-sounding acts are being dropped from labels because they don’t sell enough records?

“We’ve never relied on record sales. We just sold shirts and played shows. And it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us. So this music industry recession hasn’t affected us very much. Granted, if things were different we would probably have got big money offers when we were out of our contract with Relapse. But we were able to survive without that because of the way that we’ve learned to do things.”

The internet and technology has been a big help then?

“I’d probably be homeless right now if it wasn’t for technology. I wouldn’t trade it for the way it was before. I’m not making a living off record sales and I never have. So in one respect it’s things like [Spotify and file-sharing] that have really helped a band like us survive. If I had some sort of flea market that sold socks, and drew some smiley face on them, I’d probably make more money than I make from selling records and that’s kinda fucked up, there’s no doubt about it.

“So really we have to look at it like, ‘Okay, is the music itself the product?’ And that’s how we’ve always looked at it. It’s just made us work harder: We’ve worked to interact with our fans and provide them with interesting things like limited edition t-shirts that come from us and that we package ourselves, and that’s what we’ve survived on. So people hearing us and becoming fans of our band has only helped us, whether we’ve been paid for it or not.

More Lily Allen Updates

Before I start this I just want to say I didn’t particularly want to write more on this subject but so much has happened since my last post I felt I should. Besides people seem to like reading about it.

Well it looks like Lily Allen really did start something with her file sharing rants on her Myspace and it seems with technology and the sheer speed news travels now, it means reactions seem to arrive just moments after the initial news has broken. Of course this helps if you are a big star with a huge internet presence, people have been arguing about piracy forever but when I twat tweet about it I am mostly just ignored.

Lily seems to be getting herself in all kinds of trouble and only half of it seems to be about her actual stance on file sharing. She had to release an apology to Techdirt because they claimed she copied (stole* dont worry it’s definitely not the same as music piracy) an entire post from their site on a blog called It’s Not Alright that she set up just for the file sharing debate, the site has subsequently been taken down because according to her twitter “I’ve shut down the blog. the abuse was getting too much”.

On top of that two mixtapes, that were until recently, available have also caused a bit of embarrassment for her, because if you’re going to take a stance against something, it is, generally speaking, a good idea to not easily be found doing exactly what you’re supposed to be against. The two 50 minute mixtapes featured music by Jay Z and the Kinks that she was sharing illegally. However she responded by saying

“I made those mixtapes five years ago. I didn’t have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then. Anyway the snippets of songs you hear on those mixtapes are about 30 seconds to one minute in length, in traditional mixtape style.”

The part about the length of the ”snippets’ is a whole new argument that I wont get into. (30 seconds of one song could be nothing in a Pink Floyd epic but could be the whole track of  many others, so how do you classify a ‘sample’?)

She did decide to back down from the debate to let the ‘Featured Artists Coalition’ (an association of musicians including Billy Bragg and Annie Lennox) continue the with talks as she said she didn’t want to ruin it with the media hype she was bringing along. However she did actually turn up to a meeting they held and along with a plethora of other musicians came to an agreement detailed in this statement:

The Air Statement:

We the undersigned wish to express our support for Lily Allen in her campaign to alert music lovers to the threat that illegal downloading presents to our industry and to condemn the vitriol that has been directed at her in recent days.

Our meeting also voted overwhelmingly to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, sanctions to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringer’s bandwidth to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access functional.

Signed:

Tim Rice-Oxley (Keane)
Jamie Turner
Adriano Buffone (Raygun)
Allan Bradbury
Helienne Lindvall
Tony Crean
Andrew Laidlaw (Luck Soul)
Isard Haasakker
Tony Morrelli (The Fire Escapes)
Jean-Baptiste Pilon (The Fire Escapes)
Mark Headley (The Fire Escapes)
Hal Ritson (The Young Punx)
Billy Bragg
Ben Ward
Karl Harrison
Howard Jones
Tjinder Singh (Cornershop)
Phil Simpson
Athleen
Steve Jones
John Reynolds
Sandie Shaw (via phone)
David Rowntree (Blur)
Ed O’Brien (Radiohead)
Alan Sharland (The Hoosiers)
Martin Skarendahl (The Hoosiers)
Steven Hogarth (Marillion)
Mark Kelly (Marillion)
Guy Chambers
Patrick Wolf
Sam Duckworth (Get Cape Wear Cape Fly)
Jamie Allen
Toby Sebastian
James Kelly
Beryl Marsden
George Jones
Ross Millard (The Futureheads)
Stax Dempsey
Rona Sentinar
Fran Healy (Travis)
Karl Addy
Nathan Taylor (The Young Punx)
Josh Allegro
Ali Howard (Lucky Soul)
David Arnold
Lucy Pullin (The Fire Escapes)
Annie Lennox (via phone)
Lily Allen (Not a Member of the FAC)
George Michael
Nick Mason (Pink Floyd)

Signed After the meeting;

The Music Producers Guild
John B
Claudia Brucken (Propaganda)
Rick Wilde

So basically after saying they are against cutting off the internet to file sharers, they have released a statement saying ‘we just want to severely restrict it instead’. Thank fuck they think e-mail is a human right nowadays but seriously restricting the internet and blocking it completely are the same thing. It is such a huge place with so much high bandwidth content LEGALLY available restricting it would render it pretty pointless. And I’m not sure how it would work either. Do they not realise people go on the internet when they’re not at home? The huge business of mobile broadband… Apparently its available in other places as well, not just homes, Who could have known…

That is beside the point though the punishment isn’t the problem as such, it’s the argument itself. In my opinion instead of worrying that some record companies wont be able to give their CEO’s billion dollar bonuses because  nobody’s paying for music any more, why don’t they think of new ways to make money. How much do you reckon Spotify has slowed illegal downloading? If more money went into new technology and ideas like that instead of trying to flog  the dead horse that is the current music industry things might not be so bad.

Things change, if you don’t adapt you will die. Basic life 101

For further reading into the debate read techdirt (who Lily originally ‘stole’ from) or BBC News

Dan Bull also made a song called ‘Dear Lily’ which is worth a listen (or watch even)

To end this rather long post I would like to draw your attention to the first comment by a user called James G on the FAC website.

“Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.”

John Lennon