Oh dear, what has Lily Allen done now? The poor little poppet has been having a whinge about “people stealing her music” (copyright infringement to you, me and the law). Bless her third nipple, she’s gone to all the effort of setting up a blog (a freebie account at Blogger – her finances must be worse than I thought) and now seems to have totally lost the plot.
In a recent post she railed against the stance taken by rapper 50 Cent who sees file sharing as part of the general marketing of music. Just as an aside, he’s correct; research by the Canadian government has shown that file sharers buy more music than non-sharers. Mr Cent is right, Ms Allen is wrong and her solution to a non-problem is to alienate her audience even more. Smart career move, Lily.
She illustrated her point by copying an entire article from TechDirt and posting it on her blog with no link, no attribution and without permission. Oh dear. Lily, if you’re going to go off on one about copyright infringement at least make sure you don’t infringe someone else’s copyright in the process because it really does make you look like a complete twonk. The author of the copied article has been very gracious about the incident.
To make matters worse, she then followed it up with an apology ALL TYPED IN CAPS. Yes, Lily, shouting an online apology is really going to help. When it’s also littered with spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors it won’t help your image as a sassy young lady much either. Comments left by readers are worth five minutes of your time to read.
The most interesting part of the current debate is that artists are taking up very different, and opposite, positions. On one side, you have the Featured Artists Coalition , a group that includes Nick Mason (Pink Floyd), Billy Bragg, Tom Jones, Annie Lennox, Dave Rowntree (Blur), Radiohead and other people that make music that people actually want to buy and listen to. They are against draconian copyright legislation such as Internet disconnection for file sharers. On the other side you have a group who would like to remove the hands of teenage fans that have the temerity to want to listen to their idol’s creative output but are too skint to buy all the songs. This second group comprises people such as Ms Allen, Elton John, Gary Kemp and James Blunt. Sheesh, no self-respecting member of da yoof is going to download that stuff. In fact, if the artist hand-delivered an autographed boxed set of their entire back catalogue to a teenager they’d probably be told exactly where they can shove it.