Grammy Winner: If You're A Good Musician, You Have Nothing To Fear With Piracy
from the but-if-you're-bad... dept
Last year, we wrote about Grammy award wining singer Joss Stone and her opinions on file sharing where she said she "loves it" and thinks "it's brilliant." More recently, Stone was asked about her EMI labelmate Lily Allen's recent misguided attack on file sharing (even as she, with the help of EMI, was file sharing a ton of tracks). Stone's response, as noted at Freakbits, is basically that musicians who are good have nothing to fear, but she could see why musicians who aren't very good (apparently, she means Ms. Allen) do have reason to fear:"She [Lily Allen] needs to sell records because she's not a singer, and that's not an offense to her because I think that she knows that too," says Stone.
"...when musicians are really making real music people come to the show and that's what we make our money from, from playing live. And I think it's probably harder for an artist like Lily and many other pop acts. It's really about the track and about their personality and their celebrity and that's how they make their money is selling those records."
Stone says that Lily cannot win a fight against music piracy, and for that matter, neither can anyone else.
"So let's just accept it and let's see it as something that can be beautiful and it might change music for the better," she says pragmatically. "It might sort the weeds from the flowers."
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Filed Under: joss stone, lily allen, piracy
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Joss Stone is a great singer, but also a bit of a flake. She is the one who complains about having a rich lifestyle and getting to travel the world, living in high end houses and getting to record her albums where she likes (the latest one in the Bahamas, boo-hoo). She has gotten rich off of selling CDs. Now she maybe feels she is rich enough that it doesn't matter, or feels somehow superior to others. Either way, she has a nasty reputation for being a diva, showing up late for concerts, and generally doing her damndest to NOT CwF, but rather to take them for granted.
Great singer, bad at everything else, and certainly not a great and credible source.
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But her argument is free music only works for good musicians. Hey, she might be right.
If your schtick is all about being hot looking, or dancing, or studio production and auto-tune...I'm not sure it behooves you to get your music out there. If you're a bad singer, it will be harder to earn money as a singer at live events. For those artists, better to keep the mediocre music in low circulation, and get the magazine covers, TV appearances, paparazzi nip slips, and videos in high circulation!
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Lily Shot Herself in the Foot
Later on this summer, remixer Dr. Rosen Rosen released a remixed version of her album. The ENTIRE album. Apparently Lily Allen had made all her tracks available for remixers and mashup-makers and he went whole hog.
I loved it.
What he did with her album was brilliant and I listened to it again and again. It made me want to compare his mixes to the real thing, and made me think that the short preview clips on the mp3 store were inadequate to appreciate them. I figured even if I didn't like anything on the official record except the single (the one track I felt he didn't improve on) I was not really out anything. I was enjoying the alternate version.
I was just waiting for payday and then Lily spoke out and it soured me so much that she lost that sale. Heck, I'm not even enjoying the Dr. Rosen Rosen remix because she's damaged her image to me so much.
So, even if Lily Allen is more of a (as they used to call them) "studio musician" as compared to a live or touring musician, she has every opportunity to drive sales and be creative. Online downloading is really not about piracy, except in the case of poor college students who don't have the bucks; and that's nothing new, back in the day people just used to copy each others' cassettes. Downloading is mostly about sampling and ease of access.
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Obviously
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Nice way of looking at it! mind if I use it on my site?
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Ha!
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who is Lily Allen? i have never heard of this person before.
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The actual argument? Why bother?
The genie is out of the bottle. Got that? Neither you nor your RIAA boss can put it back in. Educate yourself. Computer illiteracy in the 21st century doesn't look good.
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