p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- Allison Outhit`s When Two Worlds Collude: Artists and Fans Hug It Out in Exclaim! magazine highlights how things could, and should be, between fans and artists.

Among other things, While criminalizing unauthorized file sharing has created public hatred against the music business, it has also seriously damaged the artists in whose names those initiatives are supposedly launched, she says, continuing »»»

Nice how that works out for the industry: keeping artists and fans at war with each other ensures they`ll never band together against a common foe.

That may be about to change. With the foundation of a2f2a, a site that encourages file-sharers and musicians to debate as peers, a conversation has been started that could see musicians and fans hugging it out at last.

a2f2a was started by Billy Bragg and myself. Allison interiewed us both for her piece and my end of it was done by email as sort of a Q&A. I re-ran her subsequent article in p2pnet and a2f2a and at the end of the a2f2a item, By way of a kind of PS, Billy and I met for the first time [on Monday] in person, that is, I said, adding:

He`s touring Canada and as part of his trip, came to Vancouver Island, BC, where I live. We had a great talk and I came away believing he`s someone we can trust. Yes, I hit him with Three Strikes and although I don`t have anything I can put into print, I feel a whole lot happier and I can say things will be interesting over the next little while. And that`s in the positive rather than Confucian sense. `They` don`t get it. But we do. Definitely stay tuned.

a2f2a is doing really well and although it`s somewhat lopsided at the moment, no worries because intelligent people on both sides of the fence are forcefully putting their perspectives to each other. And that`s groundbreaking. It`s never happened before.

Billy has been largely out of the picture because he`s been on the road, touring Canada. But he`ll be back home in the UK shortly and mixing it on a2f2a again.

Meanwhile, it`s no surprise fans are at this point making the most noise. They are, after all, the ones being villified by as thieves and criminals.

Lucky for the industry, musicians tend to be a badly organized, somewhat apathetic bunch, says Allison, adding, The industry has taken advantage of that lack of self-representation to promote itself as the loyal guardian of musicians, and Until the industry started suing music fans for sharing music on the web, artists were seemingly content to let that representation live.

Not any more and when I say Hang In, we`ll have artists joining in soon enough, I`m not sticking my neck out. It`s a guarantee.

Meanwhile, below is the email Q&A I had with Allison for her Exclaim! story.

Cheers!

Jon Newton – p2pnet /a2f2a

[This post appeared originally in a2f2a.com]

__________________

Allison: What is p2pnet all about?

Jon: It`s about a view from the other side of the fence — it`s for, and by, the people who keep Big Music, Hollywood and the rest of them alive, a minor detail the labels and studios (and everyone else, come to that, ) continually forget.

Allison: The internet was pretty much founded 40 years ago to be a file-sharing tool.  Why do you think legislators and rights-holders have been so slow to catch on to file-sharing as a key web 2.0 web-shaping phenomenon?

Jon: You can`t lump them together, unless you`re talking about rights-holders as the people wielding the whip and legislaters as the ones doing the jumping every time it`s cracked. Label lobbyists have a significant number of influential politicians in their pockets. Fot evidence, all you have to do is look at the Three Strikes and you`re Off The Net farce that`s playing out around the world. In the lamescream mainstream media, its being presented as a number of separate `initiatives` in different countries. But it`s all one movie and record industry operation.

The rights-holders who, as far as the music industry is concerned, are Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US, but headed up by our very own Edgar Bronfman jr whose family itself initially made money by peddling product that was illegal on the other side of the border: booze) haven`t been slow in catching on. They haven`t even tried. The Net means competition and in their lexicon, that`s a dirty word. Their sole objective from Day One, was, and still is, to gain total control of how `product` is distributed online, and by whom. They want it so they, and they alone, can use it as their exclusive product marketing, sales and handling vehicle. Everything else is secondary.

Allison: What are its goals?

Jon: Billy and I share one bottom line bottomline: Artists need to be paid, and fans want to pay them, and as we say on the a2f2a mission page [http://a2f2a.com/mission-statement/], we have three main goals »»»

1. Help each community better understand the other;
2. Help find a practical and workable system which offers artists fair remuneration in exchange for access to material by fans; and
3. Help set the agenda for discussions about the role P2P can play within the online digital record industry.

Allison: Describe the circumstances under which a2f2a was founded.

Jon: I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. That`s from The Beatles` 1967 song I Am The Walrus and for me, they sum up what the net`s all about. Peers to peers. People2people. P2P. And through it, there`s now a chance for two critical masses, those who make songs and those who enjoy them, to start a massive online chain reaction uniting musicians with fans and fans with musicians, to everyone`s mutual benefit.

Music is meant to be passed around and enjoyed, not owned exclusively by a small band of corporate pirates epitomised by the Big 4. That isn`t to say it should be free as in free beer, but it should at least be affordable and within easy reach of everyone. And yet, it isn`t — not corporate `product,` anyway. Singly and together, in one way or another, the Big 4 control the music industry.

They say sharing is exactly the same as stealing, and they`re using his specious and indefensible claim as the visible element in their efforts to gain total control of the Internet. I Am the Walrus is more than 40 years old and by any reasonable standard, it should by now have entered the public domain for free use by anyone. But if you or I dare to share it online, and if any of the Big Music `trade` organisation such as the the CRIA in Canada, the RIAA in America, or the BPI in Britain, are alerted and somehow find out where we live, we could wind up on the wrong end of a Big 4 anti-file sharing subpoena.

On October 2 I ran `Billy Bragg solves the file sharing problem [http://www.p2pnet.net/story/29292],` based on his September 30 editorial in The Guardian called A better way to sink internet pirates. The next day I followed up with  Billy Bragg to p2pnet [http://www.p2pnet.net/story/29279] and as I`ve said on both p2pnet and a2f2a, something happened I don`t believe has happened before since the file sharing controversy was launched by the labels in 2003.

My original post was less than complimentary to Billy Bragg. But he began talking to p2pnet readers in a series of posts addressing individual points raised in Readers` Writes, as I call comments. At first, a lot of readers believed this was just someone pretending to be a high-profile artist. However, the tone and tenor suggested to me they were real and I asked Billy to get in touch so we could talk — he as the member of one constituency, musicians, and me as a member of another, music fans. He responded, we traded emails and phone calls and it became pretty evident we saw eye to eye on the lot of issues, particularly that artists need to be paid and fans wanted to pay them.

In direct contrast, the music industry has spent a major fortune portraying people who share music with each other as criminals and thieves whose last wish is to pay anyone anything.

Allison: When it comes to the future of the music industry, do you think artists should be sticking with record labels and  traditional music industry structures, or should they be looking for ways to rebuild the industry more in their favour?

Jon: In the unlikely event the labels ever wake up, there`s no reason why they shouldn`t be part of the new music in digital 21st digital century. But clearly, they don`t want to be `part` of anything. They want it all.

The old bases of cash-cow `consumers` are dying fast and in 2009, we have a brand new, and rapidly expanding, pool of intelligent and articulate customers who`ve been permanently poisoned against the corporate music industry and it`s `product`. There are also hundreds of millions of kids who`d happily pay 10 or 20 cents for songs they like. My daughter, Emma, 13, and her friends (10 18) enjoy all kinds of music online, old and new, with YouTube and other video sites as their principal sources. Then they gossip with each other about what they like. Then they go to concerts. Then they buy CDs and T-shirts. I know because I have to pay for it. And they need to be separately considered, and addressed, ideally on websites, as a kind of customer unit in their own right(s).

Musicians have kids too. Some of their kids could be talking to some of our kids on purpose-built, carefully monitored sites. But as things are, they`re just targets with phony industry `educators` with spurious messages trying to turn them into good little corporate consumers, compliant in all respects. (Dont get me going on that )

Forget the labels. The full range of corporate `product` is already out there and readily available to anyone who wants it. That can`t be changed. The clock can`t be turned back. Sooner or later, what`s left of the majors will open their catalogues and drastically lower their wholesale prices. They won`t have any choice. Meanwhile, artists should do their own thing(s), and/or join  independent self-help advocacy groups such as the Canadian Music Creators Coalition.

`Trust` should be the watchword. Musicians should trust people to be fair.

Allison: What do you think their file-sharing fans would like to see?

Jon: We need a selection of sites featuring music from indie musicians, and established artists such as Billy who own their own material and who can therefore do whatever they want with it. Sell individual downloads — singles, in other words — for 15 or 20 cents per, or perhaps by size as did AlloMP3. What`s better, 20 people at 20 cents, or 1 person at $1? And include MP3s as well as regular tracks on CDs so people can easily transfer them to their music players.

Allison: Taking the national pulse: in your opinion are Canadians likely to get behind economic and legal policies that favour legitimizing music file sharing?  (through, for example, copyright reform,  ISP levies)  Or do you suspect we have all been infected with an unshakeable case of Hollywooditis?

Jon: Music file sharing is already legitimate. It`s never been otherwise. What`s in question is: are unauthorised uploads and downloads truly devastating the corporate music industry, as the Big 4 claim? I don`t believe it is. In fact, I think it`s a priceless form of viral advertising. Neither the labels nor the studios have ever come anywhere near proving files shared equal sales lost. When someone shares a tune with someone ese, it doesn`t mean the person on the receiving end would have otherwise have walked into a store and bought a CD, or paid for a rip-off $1 (or more) for a 10-cent ownload sold on a site offering corporate `product`.

I added:

In my view, copyright reform means accepting the reality that music copyright is all-but dead. Instead, let`s talk about how people such as myself can have direct access to online music and those who make it. I realise a lot of people, particularly those with heavily vested interests, will violently oppose this perspective. They`re the middlemen, and they`re not only represented by the labels.

“They`re also the politicians, industry lobbyists, copyright lawyers and `consultants` and all the other `professionals` who depend absolutely on the status quo remaining the status quo. Let them keep what they`ve got, and while they`re busily cutting each other`s throats, we can bypass them and decide together what we want to do, how we want to do it, and with whom.

Follow p2pnet on Twitter.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

November, 2009

---

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It`s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php

---

Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Music, P2P. 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.

HOME

Viewed 1580 times