p2pnet.net News:- Recently, Stephen Peach, leader of the ever-vigilant ARIA (Australian Record Industry Association) was interviewed by Australia’s Rocknerd and below is an excerpt

Do you personally get free CDs from record companies who are members of ARIA?
STEPHEN PEACH: Yes, I do.
RONAN SHARKEY: How many would you have got, say, in the last three months this year?
STEPHEN PEACH: Oh, the last three months? A few. Ten maybe.

There’s more of the same, but the bottom line is Peach is saying, in effect, Promo CDs? No big deal.

However, an April 16 Sydney Morning Herald continuation opens things up somewhat.

There’s an unidentified Mi2N post that goes like this:

“We’ve been waiting for it but the story’s broken at Spike, the back page of the Sydney Morning Herald. It seems that Stephen Peach – Australian Record Industry Association has been caught in another lie this week as the company’s former PR refuted his claim that he had received only a few CDs now and then as promos.

“Last week on national, he stated that artists and songwriters were compensated for lost royalties on the promo copies that he and other ARIA staff receive (under the ‘promo copies’ rules of contracts where they actually are charged rather than credited) and this was revealed to be a blatant lie. So this week, it looks like Peach has been impaled on the Spike and slowly roasted with more drama yet to come.”

So just how big is the free CD collection of the ARIA ceo and anti-music theft lobbyist, Stephen Peach?

Well, says the Sydney Morning Herald …

“… we called Peach’s former publicist at ARIA, Marcella McAdam, who furnished more detail on his habits. During her 18 months under his reign, Peach was in the habit of handwriting lists of titles he wanted and getting staff to source them from the record companies, she said – sometimes from back catalogues and sometimes two or three of the same title.

” ‘I sighted several A4 pages of titles and other employees had seen other lists as well. It wasn’t the reason I left, but it was one of them. I thought ARIA, as the body lobbying government [for artists' rights] should be showing more … leadership,” McAdam said.

” ‘Freeloading versus free downloading – to me it’s the same. You’re getting the product for free. It’s not going to stop until the record companies start saying no’.”

“While Peach, who has not returned our calls for five days, didn’t call back yesterday, the Sony CEO, Denis Handlin, said: ‘Stephen has never presented any lists or the like to us’.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2004 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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