I am always amazed at the kind of artists who get crazy famous in Great Britain, and Lily Allen has been a poster child for that kind of curiosity. Her music is pleasant enough, and she says “fuck” in some songs, okay. But I gave her a listen when her last record came out, and it bored me to death. Alright, still she’s managed to cause a ruckus over her recent blog posts suggesting that file sharing is killing the music industry and supporting a UK law that would kick violators off the Web. Mashable has a decent summary of what went down next.
However, it was found that one of her posts had been copied in part from the Techdirt blog, creating an obvious irony. Allen also admitted she distributed mixtapes of other artists’ work early in her career, somewhat undermining her case.
In a change of heart, Allen deleted the blog posts, apologized to Techdirt and said she will abandon her stance. The blog TorrentFreak claims that Allen continues to support bandwidth throttling of infringers, but not total disconnection.
Now singer Dan Bull has responded to the debate in the form of an open letter presented as a song entitled “Dear Lily”. The full video is below, and contains some pretty good zingers.
The Dan Bull video may be the best thing about this whole tiny maelstrom. I’ve included it below, and it’s pretty damning. And hilarious. Although he apparently thinks her music is compelling (I can’t hear it).
I think you can probably guess I don’t blame file sharing for the industry’s woes. I think they’re just ignoring that the price they can sensibly charge for their product (i.e., digital downloads) isn’t 99 cents per song anymore. It’s somewhere between zero and 50 cents per song depending on the consumer. The closer they get to that price, the more honest folks will entertain the idea of paying for downloads. But I’ve said all this before.
I should note that Allen has threatened (again) to quit recording altogether. If this is it, it was bleh while it lasted.
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Also this week, I continued my love affair with Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” although I took a detour.
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Finally, I gave in and got an iPod touch for my birthday. A certain recent improvement in iTunes helped me make up my mind. Any music-related apps that you’d recommend?
I can recommend to you Bebot Robot Synth if you’re interested in joining the electronic music detour I’m currently taking. I have also just downloaded bleep!Box in hopes of wasting the next several months creating and saving “phat” beats I will do nothing with.
A side note, as ambivalent as I’ve been about Apple products in the past…there’s no better way to experience YouTube than on an iPhone/iPod Touch. This is an amazing machine. I’ve had it for a day, and already I can tell I COMPLETELY underrated how awesome these damn things are.
Open Letter to Justin: Please continue your Covers series but add super cute girl who sings real good and start video taping. Please to also jump around like dork in manner of video above.
Please to recommend cute girl. No deal on the jumping, though.
That’s funny, just last week I finally gave in and bought an iPhone after much gnashing of teeth. Have only scratched the surface so far (not literally, luckily), but even thusfar it is indeed a pretty rad machine, although it sure does eat through batteries.