Latest Blog
18 Sep 2009
The Futureheads: The FAC & Filesharing
I was forwarded Lily Allen’s MySpace blog yesterday – where she puts out there, fair and square, her attitudes toward filesharing, and, notably, her opinion on the FAC. Well, seeing as I’m a Board Member of the Featured Artists Coalition, and that my own band, The Futureheads, run our own record label, I thought it was high time I shoved my two penneth in.
I must say, I think Lily has got the FAC wrong with her summary of us in the blog. That said, I can clearly see why she’s come to the conclusions she has, when there are statements from different representatives of the FAC flying around, all displaying varying degrees of passiveness about filesharing. Thing is, the FAC wasn’t initially formed with a unifying doctrine on downloading, though we are getting there. Everyone has a different opinion on whether it’s cool to have hundreds of thousands of people downloading your back catalogue in a single torrent or not. That’s the whole point of such a forum. I must say, I empathise with Lily, because my own band, The Futureheads, have struck out on our own, formed our own label, and we have no cushy mattress of cash to fall back on, should our records not sell. Literally every penny that we make from selling our records, selling our merch, and playing live shows, goes back into the ‘pot’ for the next record. So for every sale we lose to a Limewire/Pirate Bay torrent, the wheels on the bus, as it were, certainly go round fewer times. That was one of the motivating factors for my joining the FAC. It’s an organisation that gives musicians a collective voice, in an industry that is usually led by the labels and corporations. But times are changing. When we set up Nul Records, I was blown away by the amount of people who’d stop one of us on the street with a ‘Nice one – best of luck’. They were aware of what we were doing, and they were totally into it. I strongly believe that music fans want to do right by the artists. They realise that music is a two-way street, as Lily highlighted, whereby if they don’t accept that something has value, then all hope is lost and the future of recorded music per se is in jeopardy. True, the free downloading world introduces a lot of new music into fans lives, but there has to be a point of trade-off, where the music-buying public put something back into the pot, in order to keep the cycle going?
It’s a weird situation, because, as members of the FAC have said in the past, no-one wants to criticise the fanbase, and in a way, there is a punk-rock mixtape element to filesharing, which I love, but a happy medium needs to be discovered fast. A lot of bands go out of their way to make certain tracks available for free now anyway. We want to be able to continue to make music. And thankfully, judging by the amount of people who ‘officially’ downloaded our stuff last year, we know there are fans out there that want us to continue as well. But ‘faith’ will only get you so far, and right now, the biggest challenge that hundreds and hundreds of bands have, is to figure out how to run this whole thing – you know; record, tour, release music, and not lose out to the torrent world.
The Futureheads believe that it would be wrong to directly punish someone for downloading/filesharing –there are bigger culprits than the individual. There is a whole world of revenue being created through ads etc on some of these sites.
When all’s said and done, new technology is coming along every day, and maybe filesharing is just the first stop on a long cyber-galactic bus-ride. Maybe illegal downloading is a moralistic dilemma that music fans should endure? I dunno – the answers are out there somewhere, but until people start debating about this on a mass scale, rather than ignorantly pretending that nothing’s going on, then the music industry will dwindle and it’ll be harder and harder to find the cash that it takes to actually make a record or go on tour in the first place. But for getting people talking about this, and possibly making some think twice about taking everything for free, I think it’s fair to say ‘nice one, Lily’, and also to you for reading this.
The Futureheads