The web helps the music industry - and it shouldn't be ignored

Feb 5 2008 By Giles Turnbull

Paul McGuinness, manager of rock band U2, made a speech at the Midem music industry conference in Cannes last week.

In it, he complained at length about the state of the internet and its effect on music sales.

Kids today were happily paying for broadband because they had the ability to steal as much music as they like from peer-to-peer download networks, he declared.

In his speech (available in full on www.u2.com), Mr McGuinness said: "Part of the problem is that the record companies, through lack of foresight and poor planning, allowed an entire collection of digital industries to arise that enabled the consumer to steal with impunity the very recorded music that had previously been paid for."

This comment, implying that perhaps the music industry could have suppressed digital music if it had thought of it first, was just one of many in his speech that provoked a furious reaction from the wider internet community.

Mr McGuinness made direct reference to Radiohead's recent experiment with its "In Rainbows" album, which the band released under a pay-what-you-like scheme: "Sadly, the recent innovative Radiohead release of a download priced on the honesty box principle seems to have backfired to some extent.

"It seems that the majority of down-loads were through illegal P2P download services like BitTorrent and LimeWire even though the album was available for nothing through the official band site."

Firstly, there's no evidence that the experiment backfired at all.

Only Radiohead knows how much money was made, and the band has remained tight-lipped on that score. Reports claiming to estimate the amount raised were just that - estimates.

Secondly, Mr McGuinness declares that file sharing technology like BitTorrent is "illegal"; this is not the case. The technology is perfectly legal and is legally used for the transfer of plenty of data.

Another quote: "The collapse of the old financial model for recorded music will also mean the end of the songwriter."

Given the huge success of MySpace (www.myspace.com) this comment is misguided at best.

Indeed, others argue that the internet has done exactly the opposite - free up the songwriter from the clutches of record companies trying to take a cut.

Finally, Mr McGuinness called on Internet Service Providers to step in, saying they had a moral and commercial duty to filter and monitor the traffic that passes through their servers, blocking any attempt to share music. Critic Om Malik (gigaom.com) summed it up like this: "If the internet is to blame for people performing illegal music down-loads and stealing royalties from artists, then the civil engineers and construction workers that design and build roads are responsible for all global car thefts."

Should ISPs become police officers?, he asked.

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