One of my favourite pieces of music is Jammie Cullum doing Jimi Hendrix’s And the Wind Cried Mary.
He’s great and although no one can touch Jimi, I’m pretty sure he would’ve approved Jamie’s cover.
I’m also pretty sure he’d be in the front line, looking out for the rights of his legions of fans. With that in mind, it’s interesting to learn what Jamie has to say about file sharing. “
“I’m a music consumer of the highest order, and I spend an awful lot of my time looking for music, buying music, downloading music legally and illegally,” he’s quoted as saying in a New York Times article, continuing >>>
I make no bones about it – if there’s some Thom Yorke EP floating around and it’s not out until next week, then I’ll download it illegally. However, the following week I’ll buy it because I want the artwork, and I want to see the notes and to find out where it was recorded and all the rest.
However, the flip side of that is, four weeks before The Pursuit came out, I was getting all these tweets from people who’d heard it because some of the CDs sent out to journalists had found their way online. I know the album has been illegally downloaded at least 60,000 times, which is as many as the record has actually sold.
Note – Jamie isn’t whining he’s lost 60,000 sales because of the downloads.
The problem is, we’ve gone too far,” he says, adding: “You can’t start punishing people — you’d be punishing people like me, who spends thousands of pounds a year online, because I illegally downloaded something from a blog.
“We need to make the download systems so sophisticated and so comprehensive that people don’t need to download stuff for free … “
Stay tuned, and don’t buy anything from Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US) for Christmas prezzies, or anything else, until, and if, they smarten up.
Not sure what’s real and what’s unreal? Check out RIAAradar.com.
Jon Newton