My recent exchange with faux Twitter celebrity and pretend musician Lily Allen has proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the music industry is rotten to the core.
And it’s time for change.
The solution is simple. All digital music should be free.
For the purposes of the new digital environment, an environment that favors the brave and eschews the business models of yesterday, file sharing is no different to radio.
Home taping didn’t kill music. And file sharing won’t kill it either.
However, file sharing will kill the old business models. But that is a good thing for music, a good thing for musicians and a good thing for music lovers.
Already I can hear the music industry dinosaurs flinching in horror at the thought of what they see as their product being distributed for free.
What the dinosaurs fail to understand is that the public will happily support real musicians as long as they are confident that their support is not being siphoned off by a businessman in an ill fitting suit.
Even if all digital music is made free the music loving public will still be more than happy to pay real musicians for their work, either via micropatronage, a system that I have used very successfully this year, or simply by giving people the option to pay.
Making all digital music free provides real musicians, especially independent musicians, with a wonderful opportunity and the chance of a level playing field.
I’ll explain.
Currently consumers a forced to listen to what they are told to listen to. Radio is controlled by the music industry. Music on television is controlled by the music industry. The consumer, informed or uninformed, is bombarded with sonic effluent all day, every day. Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus and countless other puppets are forced into our homes every day.
But the industry can’t control the internet. And that makes them angry. Angry enough to try and shut off the methods used by people to hear what they want to hear and by musicians who want to get their music out to the public.
Independent musicians need people to hear their music. Music industry puppets need the music industry to prevent independents from being heard in order to protect the music industry monopoly that feeds them.
Why else would Lily Allen and her friends be so violently against file sharing? What is she afraid of?
Here’s the bottom line about piracy and file sharing. Music fans will buy music if they want to buy it. Musicians who are confident enough to give their music away for free do so because they understand that once they are listened to they may be financially rewarded.
Making digital music free won’t stop people paying for music. It will just stop people paying for rubbish. And that’s why the industry is running scared.
Let’s imagine I download a copy of a Miles Davis album via Bit Torrent, perhaps a reissue that, for some unknown reason I haven’t already purchased. If I like the album I will buy it since I won’t be satisfied with a compressed digital version, I’ll want the real thing. If, on the other hand, the reissue is of no interest to me, perhaps it has been remastered by a deaf donkey much like some of the recent Blue Note reissues, I won’t buy it and stick to my vinyl or existing CD copies.
It should come as no surprise to the industry that people will buy what they want to buy. And hearing music is part of making that informed purchasing decision.
Good music benefits from being heard. Bad music doesn’t.
When money is taken away from the bad music the industry will stop manufacturing and pushing it. Non musicians, the constant stream of artificial, untalented refuse that is forced down the ears of the uninformed consumer, will vanish because there will be no justification for it’s existence.
It will have no musical or artistic reason for being, obviously, but also, with the removal of the financial benefit, it will have no business reason for being.
It will simply cease to exist because it will have no reason to exist.
Good news for the real musicians. Good news for music fans. Bad news for the industry dinosaurs. Bad news for the pretend musicians.
In a free digital environment record labels will no longer be able to construct and package untalented puppets and score easy money from an uninformed audience. If the record labels want to continue to exist and flourish they will have to support and provide real music. And that, of course, means paying real musicians.
The next step to force digital music to be free. And this is where there is a problem since, unfortunately, the record labels have a legal grip on the majority of the music that isn’t, currently, free.
But there is a way to smash this through. Direct action against the artists who continue to protect and serve the record labels. Why would any artist, if they were confident in their own ability to attract an audience, not want their music to be heard by as many people as possible?
Maybe it’s time to ask them, perhaps in public, perhaps on Twitter.
And if they fail to respond everyone will see that they are either ignoring the issue or simply towing the party line and cow tailing to the wishes of their record label masters.
If enough people ask enough questions a change can be forced. Engage music industry figures on Twitter and point them to this blog post asking them to respond. It will soon become clear which artists are able to speak for themselves and which are just puppets.
Please Tweet and Retweet this blog post and link to it in any way you can if you want to force the music industry to change. This is only the beginning of a much bigger plan that will unfold next week but, for now, it’s time to get the message out and start challenging the major labels and the puppet artists who slavishly follow their instructions.
