a2f2a

There’s a chance for two critical masses — those who make songs and those who enjoy them — to meet online, I posted in We are the walrus. Or, thank you Lily Allen in p2pnet.

I was referring to the creation of a2f2a.com,  launched by Billy and myself a little over a month ago following the not-so-close combat between Allen and P2P file sharers.

The site is doing really well to the extent it quickly became evident we needed someone to keep track of input that’s continuing to flood in and Devil’s Advocate took on the task of digest editor.

Below is the bottom line from the first entry >>>

1. Industry propaganda has been spread all around, leaving artists and fans inappropriately pitted against each other, when in fact both want good music released in a convenient format, at a fair price, and with fair remunerations.
2. Trust has to be rebuilt on both fronts.
3. File sharers are not “criminals” or “thieves”.
4. Artists are not “gold-diggers” looking to gain maximum wealth from minimal effort.
5. Artists want to be paid, and the fans want to pay them.
6. The Recording Industry is no longer essential to either produce or distribute music, however currently still owns and controls virtually everything that shapes the scene.

Yesterday afternoon I was re-reading some of the posts in a2f2a when my phone rang. It was a friend from the UK.

“Joss Stone is having a go at Lily Allen over the fie sharing thing,” she said.

She is?

Sorting the weeds from the flowers

“File sharing’s not okay for British music,” Allen had blogged in a post  picked up by the mainstream media and trumpeted around the world. “We need to find new ways to help consumers access and buy music legally, but saying file sharing’s fine is not helping anyone — and definitely not helping British music,” she’d delared. “I want to get people working together to use new digital opportunities to encourage new artists.”

I’d definitely agree with the last part. It’s one of the reasons Billy and I started a2f2a.com. The other is: contrary to corporate music industry  statements, online music fans would love to pay artists, as long as they know the money is going to them.

Now Stone, a UK soul singer who played Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s wife # 4 in The Tudors series, has thrown herself into the file sharing mêlée telling the Press Association >>>

She’s [Lily Allen] not going to win [the] fight [over downloads]. None of us will win that fight. So let’s just accept it and see it as something that can be beautiful and might change music for the better. It might sort the weeds from the flowers.

That’s good.

Not so good is the fact she also launched a personal attack against Allen who, according to Stone in the Guardian, “needs to sell records because she’s not a singer, and that’s not an offence to her because I think that she knows that too”.

Allen is “more of a personality than she is a singer”, Stone said in a “response to Allen’s increasingly militant stance against illegal filesharers,” says the story, which goes on >>>

For Stone, musicians shouldn’t seek to amass as big a fortune as possible – but simply support themselves. “Who said that musicians have to be millionaires?” she asked. “Who made this a rule? We don’t need that much money. We only need enough to make music, eat and go on tour.

“Of course, that’s all for her to say,” it says, adding, “Stone’s contract with EMI is worth a reported £7.5m.”

And back in 2005, “EMI felt able to give Joss Stone, a teenager it has under contract, $100,000 worth of uncut diamonds as a birthday present,” I said in p2pnet.

‘… we can work together to disarm the industry …’

Bragg, as a board member of Britain’s new Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), set up to represent the interests of recording artists, wants to see musicians and fans working together instead of against each other.

He was recently at a meeting with Intellectual Property Office officials in London.

“Talking afterwards we all felt that was very significant, a tacit acceptance of the FAC argument that non-commercial behaviour needs to be lifted out of copyright law,” he said in a2f2a.com

Now he’s looking for support to break the cycle from file sharers, “particularly in the big fight that we will have next month when the government publish their Digital Britain Bill,” he said, adding:

“Copyright is the stick that they use to beat you and I believe that, as it is being debated at the highest level over the next six months, as governments ask for submissions on the subject, we can work together to disarm the industry to such an extent that they can no longer beat you up over non-commercial use.”

Stay tuned.

Jon Newton