Cowell is coming out saying if it wasn’t for the X-factor, we wouldn’t have discovered genuinely talented people like Leona etc. Fair enough, but if it wasn’t for the X-factor and it ramming the “we’re discovering new talent” message, what other avenues would talented people have had available to them to promote themselves?

I’m working with guys at the minute who are trying to give bands a way to make it on their own, and the RATM campaign proves that all you need to make a number one, even a Christmas number one, is a facebook group and a download on iTunes. *Anyone* can do that, and that’s what needs to be made clear.

It’s not about a personal attack on Cowell (I actually like the guy, I think he’s smart and is making the most of what he’s got). It’s not about the song (though it’s somewhat amusing to think of Killing in the name being a christmas number one!). It not about Facebook vs X-Factor as some of the media is billing it, it goes deeper. With this, people are now saying they want more from their music than manufactured pop and its time has passed. Even if RATM don’t make number one, it’ll be number two beyond any shadow of a doubt and I think the message is pretty clear.

Thing is, the facebook group has 750K members. Even if each member just buys *one* copy of the single, it’ll be almost double what the xmas number one sold last year.

Oh, and the campaign has raised over £30K for Shelter so far, and Tom Morello (RATM’s bass player) has come out this morning on radio and said he will donate earnings from the single to Youth Music, a scheme helping young musicians in the UK.

So come on, get on Amazon and get your copy it’s only 29p, and show you want more from your music than just regurgitated saccharine cover pop.

Do here, do it now!

QUICK EDIT – The .29p version DOES count towards the chart. Amazon have to buy it for 40p, which they are – they can retail it for whatever they want, this has been confirmed multiple times by Amazon and The Official Charts Company.

1. Mandleson is an idiot (this I knew already)
2. Some of the Lords are actually pretty clued up as to what the internet is and how it works
3. They’re all wrong

There were some good points made, and most of the comments reflected the need that to stop the piracy in the first place, viable alternatives must be available – it’s unfair to criminalise someone downloading a classic track he can’t buy on-line, or indeed in his local record store. There’s no Al Frankens (American Senator – see his response to a letter from a voter on the subject of net neutrality here) amongst them, but they weren’t a total disgrace.

So, ignoring the controversial “Henry VIII” Clause 17 (which fortunately seems likely to get killed) that gives the Secretary of State powers to re-write large amounts of the copyright act to suit whoever he wants, Clause 11 is the one that I want to talk rant about.

It allows the Secretary of State to require ISP’s to impose “technical measures” on customers meeting certain criteria, basically disconnections, P2P blocking or who knows what else. This is effectively giving him (or her) the ability to effectively redesign an ISP’s core network which they’ve invested potentially millions of pounds in. Well, that sounds like a good way to kill an industry doesn’t it?

So on one hand you’ve got the Government with their Digital Britain report saying how they’re going to grant universal access to the Internet because it’s a really important thing, and on the other hand they’re trying force ISP’s to disconnect anyone who participates in file sharing which, let’s be honest, is a huge proportion of UK internet users.

Making it the ISP’s problem won’t work though – your service provider is not the police, they don’t have the power to enforce the law and they’re no more responsible for you downloading the latest Harry Potter than Audi are if you take your R8 down the M1 at 155mph. So why are the Government trying to make the Internet Service Providers liable? It’s simple – trying to take action against all the individuals participating in file sharing would result in a large proportion of the UK’s population being criminalised, and that doesn’t win votes. Get the ISP’s to be the bad guys though, and the Government get to keep their pals in the recording and film industries happy by decreasing piracy and the populace don’t vote in a new set of politicians.

What people seem to be forgetting is that ISP’s don’t actually really want P2P traffic on their networks and have been actively trying to kill file-sharing themselves for years, without any kind of success. If the consumer who downloads an album for free is ripping off the record label, it’s the ISP that’s paying for it.

You see, the bandwidth that you used to download the album costs money. Yes, you pay your internet subscription but that’s based on the probability that you won’t be using your connection at it’s maximum all the time. This is called contention, and you can think of it as sharing your connection – average ratios are 50:1, so for every 50 people with a 16mb ADSL connection (800Mb total), there’s really only 16Mb actually available. And once you start downloading stuff on P2P, it can saturate your connection for long periods of time, causing the 16Mb that’s available to the 50 people to be hogged by you. And if someone else on your contention pool does it, and another person, that really starts to slow things down. And when broadband gets slow, customers complain – the only option the ISP has is to get more bandwidth (which costs money), or stop you from using P2P sites.

Which do you think they want to do?

The bottom line is rather than work against the ISP’s, the government should be working with them, trying to find a solution that works for all parties, not enacting draconian laws to enforce the will of the rights holders on a separate, and unrelated, industry.

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.