| 'Piracy' - An Open Letter to
the Music Industry
I think, perhaps, it is time to lay it on the line. Memo to the record industry: I like music. I have always found the cash to purchase recorded music ever since I bought my first single as a young teenager in the sixties. I like a wide variety of music - rock, metal, jazz, folk, club, classical, soul, reggae and electronic - and I have a collection of between four and five hundred CDs. Before that I had a large vinyl collection. I have almost stopped buying CDs now. Why? It's not because I'm downloading 'pirate' MP3s. I don't have any MP3s. It's because, even with my catholic tastes in music, you aren't producing anything worth listening to. You grew fat and complacent as you systematically ripped me off when I rebuilt my vinyl collection on CDs. In the sixties and seventies I followed the output of record labels I liked, and I would buy stuff by people I'd never heard of on the strength of, for instance, the Immediate or the Island label's reputation. Nowadays, in common with most people I know, I regard record companies and their executives as a loathsome bunch of parasites sucking the life out of both consumers and artists. I have no sympathy for the bind you find yourself in. Your cant about it being caused by piracy fools no one outside the industry and blinds you to the measures necessary to put your own house in order. Indeed it's a classic case of an industry which is failing to deliver a product that the public want to buy. You can keep things going for a while with major marketing hype but ultimately if you don't produce something people want, at a price they are prepared to pay, then you will go to the wall. And I won't be the only one dancing on your grave. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2743833.stm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/29190.html |
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