Over the last few years we’ve reported on many artists who’ve spoken out about piracy. Some did so in a positive or at least pragmatic way, but others including Lily Allen launched a direct assault on everything file-sharing related.

The first group of artists is now joined by UK rock legend Liam Gallagher who, in his characteristic thoughtful commenting style, discussed some of the pros and cons of file-sharing. Illegal downloaders don’t bother him, he told Shortlist in an interview, adding that he is annoyed by big artists who complain about piracy.

“Downloading’s the same as what I used to do – I used to tape the charts of the songs I liked [off the radio]. I don’t mind it,” Gallagher said about his past as a copyright infringer.

“I hate all these big, silly rock stars who moan – at least they’re fuckin’ downloading your music, you cunt, and paying attention, know what I mean? You should fuckin’ appreciate that – what are you moaning about? You’ve got fuckin’ five big houses, so shut up,” he added.

Although it could have been framed more delicately, Liam does have a point. It is far from obvious that music piracy is actually hurting sales. If it doesn’t, piracy is only broadening the fanbase of an artists at no cost, and that can never be a bad thing.

Then again, a comment like Liam’s is easy to make for someone who has already sold more than 50 million albums during his career.

Liam’s brother Noel, who is the former lead guitarist of Oasis, has made similar comments in the past. Although Noel admitted to be a complete computer illiterate, he went on record stating that he doesn’t mind people passing along his work for free online.

“If people are willing to have faceless CDs like that in their collection, good for them. It would be absolutely ludicrous for a rock-star to demand that people pay money for albums because the kids haven’t got that much money to pay for an album, so if they can find it for free, go ahead!”

It’s needless to say that many Oasis fans have taken this advice from the Gallagher brothers to heart. The most popular download on BitTorrent at the moment is the band’s discography, which is still getting thousands of new downloads every week.

Aye Lars!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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By allowing its users to access millions of songs for free, the music streaming Spotify has revolutionized the music industry by handing them a potential competitor to illegal downloading.

Unfortunately, the labels themselves are not as enthusiastic as most users are, as they doubt the service’s ability to generate enough revenue.

Indeed, if we take a look at the numbers relating to Lady Gaga that we reported a few days ago, Spotify is barely generating more revenue than most artists make from illicit file-sharing. With an income of only $167 for more than a million plays, he/she is not going to be able to pay the rent.

However, it turns out that this might not be the fault of Spotify’s business model, but rather the involvement of some of the major labels in the project. As reported before, Sony BMG bought 5.8% of Spotify for 2,935 Euros, Universal Music got 4.8% for 2,446 Euros, Warner Music paid 1,957 Euros for 3.8% and EMI pocketed 1.9% for an investment of 980 Euros.

Lady Gaga is signed by Def Jam (Universal) which partly owns Spotify, which probably has a significant impact on the revenue she makes. After all, the major labels wouldn’t pay the artists from their own pockets would they?

This was confirmed recently by Lily Allen who commented on Twitter: “Did you know the major[s] own hold massive stakes in Spotify, and earn advertising revenue at yet another loss to the artist?”

Of course, this diminished revenue wouldn’t be a problem if Lily signed her music up for digital distribution with a service like RouteNote, who offer the full per track rate, and only take 10% on the back end.

In fact, TorrentFreak has heard from various sources that independent distributors can get deals of at least $0.03 per play with Spotify. This adds up to a pay day of $30,000 instead of $167 for a million plays, which suddenly sounds like an altogether better deal.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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Say what you like about Lily Allen. Agree with her. Disagree with her if you like. Whatever the position, it’s difficult to take it away from her – she has done more in the last week to raise the online debate over illicit file-sharing than any other artist in recent months. People are talking about this issue and that is always a good thing.

Debate, discussion and hopefully understanding will bring this file-sharing ‘war’ to an end one day but in the meantime let’s not forget what this is ultimately all about – the music.

“After Lily’s hectic week I’ve made a pro-filesharing song and video calling her up on a few of the claims she’s made,” begins an email from UK musician Dan Bull to TorrentFreak this morning.

“I’ve also tried to outline some of the main moral arguments for filesharing in the lyrics. Hope you enjoy, and hope the readers do too.”

Dan pretty much says it all in his song to Lily, so we’ll shut up now and let you enjoy it.

…or if you prefer, download the MP3 here.

Dan’s MySpace page can be found here and his album ‘Safe’ is available from CDBaby but can also be downloaded digitally from iTunes, Amazon and Napster.

You can grab it free of charge here

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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There can hardly be a reader who hasn’t read about the raging debate sparked by Lily Allen and her now-defunct anti-piracy blog/campaign. It has been quite the hot topic this week.

Up until yesterday, Lily was one of the most prominent supporters of a proposed 3 strikes regime to deal with alleged file-sharers – crucially one which would ultimately lead to disconnection from the Internet for those accused. However, this put her at odds with the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) who felt that disconnections are too draconian.

Yesterday, despite saying that she would not attend due to a feared media scrum, Allen attended a meeting in London of around 100 musicians including representatives from FAC in order to find some common ground to move forward.

The artists took a vote and instead of backing up Allen’s disconnection calls, went for a more palatable option – maintaining a basic level of Internet access for alleged pirates but throttling their bandwidth so that file-sharing would become impractical.

“Our meeting voted to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter, and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringers’ bandwith to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic e-mail and web access functional,” said the artists.

Lily Allen closed down her anti-piracy blog yesterday after just a few days in operation, claiming that the abuse she suffered there was too great to continue. Nevertheless, despite the fact she has backed away, the artists said they wished to express support for her anti-piracy campaign.

“We are trying to find a proportionate response to a real problem that is damaging our industry. I hope it will convince the record labels that this is a way of sending a message to file-sharers,” said Billy Bragg of FAC.

With Lily’s crowd, the Featured Artists Coalition and also UK Music likely to support throttling instead of disconnections, there appears to be a unified voice forming from the artists.

However, while we predict that Internet users will fail to respond to threats (even reduced ones such as throttling), there will be even stronger objections to the stance taken by the artists yesterday from the Big Four labels.

Having ruled out going after individual file-sharers in court, they have put all of their eggs in a single basket which relies on ISPs taking disconnection action against alleged pirates. It is hugely unlikely that they will support these watered-down proposals but we won’t have to wait long to find out. According to The Times, the labels will meet this morning and are expected to draft a letter to Lord Mandelson shortly.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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In a few dozen articles on her new blog, Lily Allen complained how illegal file-sharing is bankrupting the music industry. Unfortunately for her she forgot to remove some of her old mixtapes from LilyAllenMusic.com, which revealed that she’s not the saint she claimed to be.

However, just a few hours after we posted the article, Lily explained that she’s not a pirate but simply didn’t know any better.

“I made those mixtapes 5 years ago, I didn’t have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then…,” she responded.

What she probably meant to say is that she had no clue about copyright before her income depended on it. Yet, she believes that every other person on this planet should know better, or get their Internet access cut off. Way to go girl.

In fact, the old Lily from 5 years ago is not too different from the hundreds and thousands of casual file-sharers today. Copyright is a complex issue and the boundaries between right/wrong and illegal/legal are not always that clear. Instead of waging a war against file-sharers on the blog she could have tried to pass her knowledge about copyright on to the public.

She chose to make it a soundboard for frustrated artists instead, which only resulted in negative reactions from the public up to a point where Lily couldn’t take it anymore. Indeed, TorrentFreak read one posting on the site which had in excess of 100 comments – only 4 of which supported the singer’s position.

“I’ve shut down the blog, the abuse was getting too much,” she explained on Twitter a few minutes after she announced the end of her legendary music career.

Just before she pulled the blog she wrote “I will not make another record,” adding “The days of me making money from recording music has been and gone as far as I’m concerned, so I don’t stand to profit from [anti-piracy] legislation.”

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the debate Lily inflamed over the last week. While there seemed to be an endless stream of rich musicians willing to complain on behalf of bands we’ve never heard of with “we aren’t suffering, they are” statements, there were also huge numbers of music fans who were more than a little reluctant to be lectured by well-off superstars on the issue.

But most prominent were those vehemently opposed to UK plans to disconnect alleged infringers from the Internet. The abuse that Lily spoke of on her blog largely wasn’t directed at her, but at these plans and her support for them. Think again Mr Mandelson.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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After we found out that Lily Allen copied an article from Techdirt without attribution or permission to prove why copyright infringement is wring, we called her a hypocrite. Even celebrity guru Perez Hilton agreed with this assessment, and it seems that Lily is more hypocrite than we could have ever imagined.

In a reply to our criticism Lily wrote the following blog entry in which she entirely missed the point we tried to make.

“I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS [sic] THAT I WASNT TRYING TO PASS OF THOSE WORDS AS MY OWN , HERE IS A LINK TO THE WEBSIITE I ACQUIRED THE PIECE FROM.”

Judging from here response it is “quite obvious” that Lily doesn’t have a clue about copyright. Lily seems to argue that we accused her of plagiarism, but we only meant to point out that she infringed on Techdirt’s copyright by copy/pasting their article without attribution.

Also, this is not the only infringement on her blog. While she’s trying to point out how much damage ‘pirates’ do to the music industry she blatantly infringed the copyrights of a number of newspapers by posting scanned articles.

To make things even more absurd Techdirt discovered that Lily is pirating music herself by offering some unauthorized mixtapes (tape 1 and tape 2) on her website LilyAllenMusic.com. The tracklist of one of the mixtapes reveals a list of no less than 19 unauthorized tracks. This means the RIAA can easily sue her for millions.

Please Lily, explain to us why it is okay for you to copy, paste and pirate others work, while you label people who do the same as thieves? Are we missing something here, or do you really think that copyright is limited to your own music?

What about the poor people working at the newspapers who might lose their job because you are pasting scanned articles online? Not to mention the poor artists that ended up on your mixtape who’s lives are ruined because of your selfish actions.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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