So, I’m reading BBC News and read about Lily Allen, who I heard about and first listened to when she was on MySpace hawking her music. Strangely enough, it was free except for advertisements. If I remember correctly, you could download tracks for free as well, but only those the artist authorized for downloading. Well, Lily Allen is talking about how the Featured Artists Coalition [FAC] are saying that torrenting is fine and should be considered the mix tapes of the modern age. She also suggests that pirating is harming the UK music scene specifically. She thinks it makes it “harder for new acts to emerge.” Which is just her opinion. But I think there is plenty of evidence that shows that distribution of music, of all the categories of shared content, encourage the discovery of new artists quite contrary to Allen’s claim that it creates an air of artist paid for by Simon Cowell.
Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf wrote a research paper in 2007 entitled “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis“, which suggests that there is no impact on actual sales of music due to file sharing. No, there is another reason. I’ll update this entry when I complete my reading of the article.
Although I am not a torrent consumer, and prefer to stream music from sites like Pandora, or listen to the Radio, I think that the free distribution of music allows for listeners to consume and if they truly value the artist, they will pay for the CD or the digital track via sites like iTunes. It was and is the spirit of the Internet, MySpace [where Allen got her greatest distribution to cost benefit], and on to Torrents. The people who pirate thousands of dollars would never have paid for the music in the first place, regardless of any hurdle presented. They would stop consuming, or do what I do, free services.
Allen also states that mix tapes were poor quality and that encouraged people to purchase the music. Sure, back in 1984. But times change, and the quality of the mix tape should not be any reason to prevent people from creating mix tapes in digital format. If not for sites like Napster, and MP3.com, and Pandora, and MySpace, and many others, I would never have discovered hundreds of musicians… only artists that are “puppets paid for by Simon Cowell”, as Allen puts it.
At least with digital distribution and even file sharing, it is up to the artist to decide distribution channels, price point, and means to deliver the money directly to the artist. Besides, most artists profit from performing live concerts as CD sales go to the recording channel and not to the artist. Sites like CD Baby allow production on demand and compensation directly to the artist. Production equipment is a fraction of the cost now as well. So, barriers to independent production are lower than when mix tapes were around.
I think Lily Allen needs to get a bit more practical in an age of instant communication. Don’t try to stifle modernization of a broken system so that you can get pennies per CD, get out on the stage and make thousands per performance. Perhaps that is the reason, because I’ve discovered too many artists to count because of free services and free distribution. Still, I can’t condone torrenting because there is no conversion in any way to some metric. How do we know that a song is any good for instance?
The worst impression I get of Lily Allen is based on a feeling I get from the article when she says “Mix tapes were rubbish quality – you bought the real music, because you liked the track and wanted to hear it without the DJ cutting off the end of each song. In digital land pirated tracks are as good quality as bought tracks, so there’s not a need to buy for better quality.”
This shows that she’s buying into the con game of making a CD with 11 tracks of garbage and one good song. Something that frustrated the hell out of every listener of music before I was born and over my 38 years of existence. Why do you think iTunes and Pandora are such phenoms? It is because they cater to the demand of the market.