You wouldn't steal my bike, so why steal my music?

Listened with interest last night to the inaugural John Peel lecture delivered by Pete Townshend of The Who (Watch The John Peel Lecture in full). Townshend examined the current state of music media and asked the question: Can John Peelism survive the Internet? In an age of free downloads and a disposable attitude to music, can creative people earn a living, and without radio how can the "unpolished" music that John Peel championed find an audience?

Townshend was very passionate on the subject of copyright, arguing strontgly against unauthorised file-sharing, saying the internet was "destroying copyright as we know it".

He also said that people who downloaded his music without paying for it "may as well come and steal my son's bike while they're at it". You wouldn't break into his house and take the bike, so why steal the earnings that would pay for that bike.

Making the point that in all other walks of life, people are paid for work - If someone "pretends that something I have created should be available to them free... I wonder what has gone wrong with human morality and social justice", he said.

Obviously Townshend himself is far from being a struggling musician and he acknowledged this but pointed out that the position for new musicians is far from rosy. There is also a creative dilemma whereby "A creative person would prefer their music to be stolen and enjoyed than ignored. This is the dilemma for every creative soul: he or she would prefer to starve and be heard than to eat well and be ignored."

A lot of people would perhaps regard downloading music for free as not legal but, you know, essentially ok and it was interesting to hear a musician's perspective on this. Well worth a listen if you have the time.

- Fiona

Comments

[John Cooper]

I have not listened to it yet but it is a fine line. I do creative things in software every day but don't expect people to pay me every time they use our website. I get paid when I work not because I once did something clever and the same I think is true for session musicians I think. The argument seems to be that before the record industry nobody made any music and we can't go back to that. I suppose it has to do with how you expect to get paid and that will always be tricky for the arts.
I think that there is much more music than ever out there but a lot of it is not controlled by the music industry. The internet allows people to share their music simply and it would be nice if the current record industry was not so protected so that we could move on to a more open model. I find a track that somebody has uploaded onto the internet, like it and so pay for it or go and see them live. One of the main problems I think at the moment is that the record industry has less way to make money from and control the artist in the current market and so they want to regulate it so they can continue as they always have. It is another example of large corporations paying to get laws changed in their advantage to preserve dying business models. The record industry needs to go the way of the scribes.

[Debby Raven]

Another element to this of course is: If creative people don't get paid, they can't pay for their consuming interests, which are more likely than not to be in the creative field. So creativity dies out.