Lily Allen & Matt Bellamy are wrong

Music piracy – it’s a contentious topic with people on both sides arguing why they’re right, why music should be free, why the artists need to get paid..

The bottom line is, it’s all pointless. The ability to record music, combined with modern era of digital distribution (and more recently social networking) has made music free. There are no ifs or buts, that is a fact. You can add as much DRM as you want, try to shut down pirate distribution sites but we’re human – no matter how high you put a fence around something, people will find a way to jump it, simply because it’s there.

The distribution of perfectly reproduced music now costs, effectively, nothing. That’s important, because the record industry has been built on maintaining ownership of the ability to reproduce music. And the most important point to take from that is that ownership becomes moot. You can’t really own something that anyone else can have for nothing. And because of that, the music industry of the last eighty or so years is facing the demise of it’s business model.

Let’s rewind a hundred years or so, and from that point look back at the human history of music. If you wanted to listen to music, what did you do? Go to a concert. Get the performer in your house/palace/pub. Musicians were famous because of their performance skill – they were performers. Most weren’t famous, most didn’t go on tours, didn’t put on major concerts. They were paid for making others happy and doing what they enjoyed, performing.

Lets jump now to the 60′s. Mass distribution of music was now commonplace and something everyone could afford. Labels were making huge amounts of money out of selling vinyl and the gravy train arrived, the image of a musician as some kind of uber celebrity became the norm, and something to aspire to. The Rock Star had been born.

And there were many of them, making a lot of money. The industry grew, hungry for more talent to sell to consumers and to make more money. And that’s how we’ve ended up with the X-Factor – a show that we pay for (via advertising) designed specifically to produce talent that we will then pay for again (when we buy the music).

The thing is, the industry has been making money on the exception rather than the rule. And now the people involved are desperately trying to find a way to swap the two around. Face facts – it’s not going to happen. The recent cash cow of music reproduction is nothing more than a “blip” on the many thousand year history of music. And now it’s being corrected.

Lily and Matt need not worry, both are talented, can actually perform and hold an audience. Indeed, I’ve paid nearly three times the face value of a ticket to go and see Muse in November. Have I ever bought a Muse CD? No. I learnt about them from Guitar Hero, listened to their catalogue on Spotify and decided that seeing them perform is an experience I don’t want to miss. And that’s the way the industry needs to go. Musicians will go back to making their money from performances. The experience of live music is something that a FLAC encoded lossless recording simply cannot compare to. Sure, artists will have to work more and play more, but no-one ever said it was an easy career choice.

The musician of tomorrow will be out there in the pubs, clubs, private events, fund raisers, high profile birthdays, doing what they love – playing music and entertaining. And they’ll get paid for that, the good ones will prosper and the rubbish ones will fail. Social networking will help promote them for free, people will ask them to play at their corporate Christmas party and everyone will have a good time and get paid.

And so, contrary to what Lily said, I don’t believe piracy is killing British music, I think this is the chance to revitalise it. Now is the time to start a culture of live performances, to get people enjoying music again. Get artists back into pubs and clubs, promote the ones you like and support them by going to see them and getting your friends to come along too, and start making music something more than just something you have on your iPod when you’re sat on the bus.

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