Sjeltur

Lily Allen is a British pop singer, her record company sold enough copies of Lily Allen albums to get several gold and platinum certifications. Recently she started a blog called “It’s not alright” against music piracy. According to her filesharing is a “disaster” for emerging artists “as it’s making it harder and harder for new acts to emerge”. She wants a summit in the UK for artists, record companies, internet service providers and the government to discuss the future of the music industry. She probably has a point that filesharing is bad for new acts in the future, but ignores that it’s actually not bad for new artists. And it turns out Allen is a pirate herself…

New technology make old business models obsolete. It has been this way in the past, and it will be in the future. Many years the music industry made tons of money because consumers needed the industry to obtain the music they wanted. The business model of the industry relied on the distribution of physical carriers of music, like gramophone records and later compact discs. In those days the industry had a monopoly on this business and they abused it, the consumer paid ridiculous amounts of money for physical carriers of music, although the consumer never became owner of the music itself.

But things have changed, nowadays music can be put in a computer file and transported through the internet, at almost no costs. It’s easy to give someone else a copy of that computer file. This new technology leaves physical carriers obsolete, making the business model of the music industry obsolete. It turns out that many consumers are willing to pay a fair amount of money to get their music online, but instead of adapting to this, the music industry is desperately clinging to the past. And so does Lily Allen. Despite her young age, she sounds like a dinosaur when she is parroting what the music industry says. The industry likes to play on the image that “copying music is stealing from the artist”, although this view is misleading. Because music isn’t a physical object, it can’t be stolen. Even laws don’t view copyright infringement as theft. Then the industry says “without people paying for music, the music industry will die out.” But the music industry will not die out, it will change in favor of true artists.

The reason Allen is parroting the music industry is probably because she is one of those acts that need the industry, instead of being a true artist. No less than 8 producers worked on her debut album Alright, Still. So 8 producers were necessary to produce less than 40 minutes of music, this tells you something about her own capabilities to produce music. After the release of her second album It’s Not Me, It’s You, she gave some more insight how the music is produced, saying “Greg (producer) builds the chords up and I just sing along and make up the words and then once you’ve got the bare song, we decide which way we’re gonna go with the production.” That is the production by Greg Kurstin, she is not credited as being a producer of the album herself at all. This practice is common in the music industry, the industry puts an act in the spotlight, but the people who actually produce the music remain relatively anonymous, although they are the true artists who come up with the creative musical ideas. Creating music is an art, this is what makes someone an artist. Someone who is merely reproducing that music, either on record or on stage, is not. That’s an act. The industry likes acts, they are very profitable.

It’s time true artists are put in the spotlight, many talented people didn’t get a chance for years because the record companies were more interested in acts that quickly made tons of money for them. With the decline of the old industry, a new modernized industry can emerge that understands new technology and adopts views on copyright sustainable in the future. Artists will be more in control, they don’t need the old industry anymore as a man-in-the-middle that’s soaking up most of the money. Artists now have the opportunity to distribute their music directly to the consumer. Money generated by selling music and merchandise, performing on stage, at a reasonable price, still provides an income for artists. The total revenue of the new industry in the future will probably be smaller than the revenue of the old industry, but the difference is that the money goes where it belongs, the artists, not the bosses of record companies.

It turns out Lily Allen is a pirate herself. On her blog she reproduced an entire article by Techdirt author Michael Masnick without permission. She gave a reaction, saying “I think it’s quite obvious that I wasn’t trying to pass of those words as my own, here is a link to the website I acquired the piece from.” Masnick thought it was funny, Allen is complaining about the horribleness of copying while copying. Also note the use of the word “acquired” instead of the word “copied”. So it’s not OK when you copy a Lily Allen album online, but it is when you acquire it..?

Update: Turns out when she tried to get attention a few years back, she made a couple of mix tapes with loads of songs from others, mixing in her own tracks…

Many artists that appear are not with the record label Allen has a contract with, EMI. And even if they did, EMI claimed that they never authorized distribution of MP3s for publicity purposes. So Allen is really a pirate! Arrrrr!

The story is just getting better and better.

Allen announced she is quitting the music industry. Her campaign against piracy seems to end as well, all posts on her blog are deleted. Luckily, Google cache reveals that she did put a comment on her blog, blaming EMI: “anyway the snippets of songs you hear on those mixtapes are about 30 seconds to 1 minute in length, in traditional mixtape style, it is infringement, correct, but it’s not my site, it’s EMI’s.” And also: “i am not a hypocrite, i don’t illegally download music, and i still think unauthorised file sharing is wrong”. And she is playing stupid: “i made those mixtapes 5 years ago, i didn’t have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then, and my attitudes towards mixtapes have changed since then.”

Even if it’s true the website is EMI’s, she made those tapes, uploaded the files, and used the tapes for her own promotion. That’s actually worse than just downloading a few songs for personal use, like most people do. Allen wants that these people get disconnected from the internet for a while when they do, it seems Allen should not be allowed to get a connection to the internet during her whole lifetime, following her own logic. Although she tries to blame EMI, she clearly admits what she did is infringement (“i made those mixtapes (…) it is infringement, correct”), then probably realized how hypocritical she really is. In a desperate attempt to hide her admission of guilt she deleted all posts from her blog, probably hoping nobody read her admission… Too late, Silly Lily. We read it, the cat is out of the bag now, and nobody will take you seriously ever again.

Of course, she has a different explanation, “the abuse was getting too much”… Well, that’s what you can expect when you take the moral high ground first and then it turns out you’re doing all those “bad” things yourself. But that’s not the real reason she deleted all her posts. She tried to hide her hypocrisy. And failed.

Another update: The MP3s are no longer available for downloading. And apparently Allen changed her tune, the plan to kick off people from the internet is now “too draconian”, British newspaper The Times reports today. Now “restriction of the infringers’ bandwidth to a level which would render filesharing of media files impractical while leaving basic e-mail and web access functional” should do the trick… Last night British artists and acts had a meeting do discuss the matter, the group also “condemned the vitriol that Allen had faced on an internet blog that she had set up to argue against music piracy”. Sure, she had faced some “vitriol”, but most comments posted on her blog were actually well-argued, and most of the “vitriol” appeared when it turned out Allen was guilty of copyright infringement herself. No word about that, though. The British artists/acts just ignore this little inconvenient fact, probably because many of those artists/acts were quite vocal about their support of Allen’s campaign against “piracy”. It would have been embarrassing, of course, to admit that one of their own is actually a pirate…