steal my soul? sell my soul?

Right, to start, this is an over blogged subject, some people talk about this far too much. So if its over blogged, why on earth am I talking about it?….to be blunt, I’m selfish, it affects me.

Now the slightly cryptic intro is over, I can start to explain myself. What I want and am going to talk about, whether you read on or not, is theft, copyright infringement and word of mouth. Again less cryptic though still cryptic but to be honest i’m angry and am not sure why.

Not to sound like a shit F.A.C.T advert but i’ve recently realized that theft, more clearly copyright theft affects everyone but in a much simpler way than terrorism, crime and all the other shite F.A.C.T would suggest. The confusion, the mixed emotions on my part, come from the fact that copyright theft has both a positive and negative affect on you and I. A simple definition of copyright infringement is “if anyone exploits your work without your consent it is likely this will be copyright infringement.” A full definition of copyright and infringement of copyright can be found here.

For me, the best way to find new music is word of mouth, truly when someone I respect tells me they love a record, I will go out of my way to hear that record, when I got my writers block a few months back all I did was ask the people I care about to recommend music to me, I found some of my all time favorite records through those recommendations, pieces of music that i will treasure until I go deaf. Rebecca, my lady, has in the past few months expanded my musical horizons hugely, gigging so much in the past year has given me the chance to meet the musicians I respect and get their take on this musical landscape. This blog itself is word of mouth, hopefully people who read it occasionally find something good enough to tell their friends about, the social networking and viral marketing revolutions heavily rely on word of mouth to survive. This blog itself is also guilty of copyright infringement, I don’t ask people before i use one of their tracks but my hope is that if you like something I blog about you might go out and buy whatever you can by the artist, very noble you might think but i know in my heart of hearts that people just download tracks and lose them in their itunes or WMP.

So whats the problem you might ask as i’m still not getting to the point. I try to give away stuff that won’t hurt the artist, I draw the line at taking money from the artists pocket, which is why i’m so frustrated, I found a blog a few days ago that had both of the le sac vs pip singles on it, not too much of a issue, singles are promotional tools after all but as i scan the rest of said blog I find allsorts of wonderful things, the full Low back catalogue, Beirut albums, the new Bees record before it was released, the B-pitch catalogue, the new Whip single and a fuck load, truck load more, about five posts a day for the past year each just a simple link to a complete album or single, a simple link showing hundreds and thousands of downloads. What made it worse is there was no discussion, no review, no nowt, just a blogger showing off his/her record collection.

I mumbled something earlier about positives and negatives, pro and cons. Simply put, if you download something you might otherwise have bought, you are taking money out of an artists pocket. Fuck labels here, I am talking about the band themselves (not the band themselves!), labels already make enough money and don’t share it willingly with their signings. I’ve come to realize though that you could easily flip that equation, you could download something that you fall in love with and spend the rest of your days buying everything an artist creates, thus sticking money into the artists wallet, that is if the artist gets to continue creating. However, if you have already downloaded something for free, whats to stop you downloading everything else a band does? Loving a record is no guarantee that you’ll part with cash for it, but if an artist doesn’t earn from what he does then how is he or she meant to continue creating? By writing in his lunch break at McDonalds?

So what I’m saying is, in this messy, badly written, half formed post, re-iterating over and over, if you steal music how do you expect people to continue creating music? If an artist has to spend 20 days a month gigging just to pay his or her rent then how do you expect them to find the time to work on new original pieces? If recorded music loses its financial value do you genuinely believe that it will continue to be as diverse and vibrant? What’s worse me selling my soul or you stealing it?

All that said and done feel free to steal the links below.
dan le sac live lectronica
scroobius pip no commercial breaks all gone

or buy
beat that my heart skipped on