This rock and roller understands how music distribution is changing, and what his fans want.

Rock star says piracy battle is lost

‘The horse has bolted’
By OUT-LAW.COM
Published Friday 15th June 2007 08:52 GMT

Major record labels are still fighting the piracy battles of 1997 according to a leading rock musician and digital rights activist.

Blur drummer Dave Rowntree told OUT-LAW that they should have realised in 1997 that their battle was already lost.

“If you turn back the clock when all this stuff was still on the horizon, the key realisation to have made was that we had lost the war already,” Rowntree told OUT-LAW Radio, the weekly technology law podcast. “That’s what I was going round telling everybody 10 years ago, saying ‘the horse has bolted, there’s no way of undoing what has been done already, the only thing you can do is to try and turn your business around so that you turn this into a plus rather than a minus’.”

Rowntree advises digital rights advocacy group the Open Rights Group and has been a vocal opponent of the mainstream record industry’s policies of chasing individual file sharers. When told that the last Blur album was leaked on to the internet he reportedly said “I’d rather it gushed”.

Rowntree said that the major labels’ policies of putting digital rights management (DRM) technology on music CDs to attempt to stop them being copied and shared backfired spectacularly.

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And then we have the Blithering idiots that are Don Henley, Celine Dion, Martha Reeves, Christina Aguilera and Wyclef Jean, and the “musicFirst Coalition“

SiliconValley.com – Performers seek royalties on airplay from radio

MUSIC GROUP PLANS TO LOBBY FOR NEW LAWS
By Alex Veiga
Associated Press
Article Launched: 06/15/2007 01:35:48 AM PDT

LOS ANGELES – A coalition of recording artists, music companies and industry groups said Thursday it will push for compensation of performers whose music is played on the radio.

The musicFirst Coalition, which counts recording artists Don Henley, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera and Wyclef Jean among its members, intends to lobby Congress for new laws requiring the payments by broadcasters.

The group said U.S. performers, from superstar vocalists to background singers, deserve to be paid when their work is aired on AM or FM radio.

‘The artists and the musicians and the community in general have come together to say now is really time to make sure that when music is played on the radio, that people who perform that music are paid fairly to do it,’ Mark Kadish, the coalition’s executive director, said during a conference call with reporters.

Under current law, only songwriters are paid royalties when songs are played on AM or FM radio.

How long will it take Clear Channel, and its satanic ilk to use this to create a new form of Payola, which will come from Artist’s royalties.

This is why we need to stop looking at IP as property.