Lily Allen and Radiohead Square Off Over File Sharing
While the debate of illegal downloading has gone from boil to simmer lately on our side of the Atlantic, the discussion hit a crescendo in Great Britain in the past week. The government there is currently proposing cutting off Internet connections for persistent illegal downloaders, and the Featured Artists Coalition, a group formed to develop policies and opportunities for musicians in the digital age, has come out against the measure. Ed O’Brien of Radiohead specifically referred to file-sharing as the modern equivalent to creating mixtapes for friends.
In response, Lily Allen started a new blog on Sunday, claiming that the prevalence of file-sharing is killing Britain’s music industry and that while it either has a positive or at very least benign effect on established acts, file-sharing denies emerging artists the opportunity to gain a commercial foothold.
Lobbing the ball back into Allen’s court, the FAC released a statement on file-sharing yesterday, indicating that it does not advocate for the practice, but simply is in opposition to the British government’s proposal to cut people’s Internet access if they’ve been trading far too many Little Boots tracks.
This is probably not over, and Allen’s blog is filling up with posts from Natasha Khan, Mark Ronson and other acts supporting her position, as well as dissenting opinions from such bands as the Futureheads. How this spills over probably depends entirely on whether the government goes forward and starts yanking IP addresses.
Stay tuned for more imported file-sharing madness.
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