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More Lily stuff: Quitting music, nicking content, engaging fans
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 24 September 2009
And so back to Lily. And for a moment yesterday it looked like Allen was announcing she was quitting music.
In a bid to convince readers of her anti-file-sharing blog that her opinions on the issue were not just motivated by personal greed, she wrote: “Just so you know, I have not renegotiated my record contract and have no plans to make another record (applause). I do however remain a fan of new music, so this is not some selfish crusade. The days of me making money from recording music has been and gone as far as I’m concerned, so I don’t (at this point) stand to profit from legislation. Except future purchases of previously recorded material (which wont be much)”.
With online chatter speculating whether that meant Allen was quitting music, her spokesperson was quick to the mark to say it meant no such thing. She wasn’t planning another record, but then she wasn’t planning not another record either, was the basic gist of the official line. Said spokesperson told Popjustice: “She is not quitting pop music and is still promoting her current album, which is why she said she is not thinking ahead to another record”. So there you go.
Elsewhere in Lily news, website Techdirt have issued a response to Ms Allen’s apology (of sorts) for copying and pasting one of their articles onto her blog without citing where it came from. As previously reported, the writer of the article pointed out the irony that in trying to convince music fans not to nick other people’s work she had nicked someone else’s work. Lily responded thus: “I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS THAT I WASNT TRYING TO PASS OF THOSE WORDS AS MY OWN, HERE IS A LINK TO THE WEBSIITE I ACQUIRED THE PIECE FROM”.
Techdirt’s Michael Masnick said yesterday: “While I appreciate the ‘apology’, that’s really missing the point. First, the reason TorrentFreak and I both brought it up wasn’t because I was upset about her using the post. As I clearly said in my response, I thought it was great that she wanted to use our post, and I encouraged her to do so. The point, though, was that it was a bit hypocritical of her to be going on and on about how evil it is to copy another’s work without their permission, when she went and did the same thing”.
He added: “Furthermore, the point is that when it’s natural and easy for people to copy like that, it’s time to learn to accept it and use it to your advantage. So, no apology is necessary to me. My post wasn’t about you trying to pass off my words as your own, but recognising that even you, Lily Allen, copy other people’s work all the time, even without realising it”.
Speaking of which, a number of people have noted that Lily promoted herself early in her career by distributing mixtapes filled with unauthorised tracks. Now, I’m not saying people should be judged on what they used to think, but if you want a soundtrack to read Lily’s blog to, this is quite good:
www.lilyallenmusic.com/music/demos/5geuj0iedc/MyFirstMixtape.mp3
Finally from the Lily file, Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien, one of the Featured Artists’ Coalition board members who Allen criticised in her original blog on the file-sharing issue, has been speaking to the Beeb. He agreed with one of Allen’s claims – that bands like Radiohead have less to lose from file-sharing because they’ve already made lots of money from their records, and now make a bulk of their cash from ticket and merchandise sales – but said he sticks by his original point, that draconian rules to suspend file-sharers’ net connections won’t work, and instead the music industry should be trying to better engage with disenfranchised music consumers.
Speaking to the World Service, he added: “What’s great at the moment is that artists, people like Lily Allen, are saying, ‘You know what, there are consequences to file-sharing’, and that’s the first step in engaging the file-sharers”.
He continued: “At the moment the industry is saying you get them to change their behaviour by threatening them. We don’t think this is realistic. Hopefully we can educate [music fans] and say, ‘Listen, if you want a great vibrant music scene and your favourite bands to be able to carry on doing it, you have a responsibility to pay for some of the work that they’ve produced’. Record companies have to license out the recordings a lot more. You want to make it completely user-friendly for somebody to be able to download something. Make it cheaper as well. Basically have more websites out there selling people’s work”.
