The idea of having to attribute the music is actually very good. YouTube is pretty efficient in taking down copyrighted music right now, so it shouldn’t be that hard to add a link to the artist’s site instead. A small banner with “The music in this video is from X, check out the new album” with a link to the artist’s site would be great promotion – instead of “Your skate video / mom’s birthday video taken down by the request of a corporate dick.” ;)

However, I still recommend artists to try and control the freebies out there by directing people to the artists sites (by embedding the URL in videos, for example). So the relationship has to be complementary, working alongside each other.

When I say that P2P is the new radio, I mean it from the point of view of the consumers. For people it’s a way to listen to music for free and get to know new artists. An important point: this doesn’t mean that having P2P fill this role is desirable at all. The current situation is not ideal, not by far. What it does tell me is that there is a certain demand that is not being met by the legitimate sources – and as always in every field, such demands are being met with illegal means.

Obviously the artist should have quite a say on how his music is being distributed, but unfortunately that situation is nowadays quite a mess. The stubborness of the record industry and their reluctance to adapt to the times has created a generation of music consumers, for whom P2P networks are the norm for getting music: without crippling DRM, without delay and for free.

Currently the only legal service out there that is even close to that is Spotify. User can get the access to the music he likes without hassle and there is at least SOME revenue via subscription fees and advertising, unlike with piracy, where it’s nil. In fact it’s easier than pirating music. Now then, I’m not saying Spotify, last.fm and similar as they are now are the gift from heaven, but they are a good start in starting to fix a situation that’s gone completely fubar.

Another sad fact is that now that copying and distributing music is trivial for everybody with a computer, an artist or a label can’t keep such tight reins on the material as earlier. It just won’t work in a situation, where there is no practical monopoly for creating copies and thus maintaining artificial scarcity of the product. Unfortunately right now it looks like the only chance is to jump on the streaming service etc bandwagon and get at least SOME revenue from people checking out your music, instead of piracy where the direct revenue is nil. The indirect… Well, after I started downloading music in the end of the 90′s, my consumption of legal music grew tenfold – literally. I probably wouldn’t listen to ambient as a genre at all without P2P. Where the hell do you just happen to hear stuff like that? Yeah, there was one radio program in here, which was on air after midnight…

The control over every album copy and every second of airplay is lost and realistically it can not be regained. The only way to fix this is to make legal options as easy as pirating and to find new ways to make money out of music.

I can’t talk for the industry, being just a small cog. But I can’t get excited by p2p for a number of reasons. One of them being that it takes things right out of my hands. I currently recommend musicians to provide giveaways as samples. But why would I get excited by letting someone else do that, as they get the traffic and advertising revenue and also get to know where the music is going? So I end up paying someone to find out who’s interested? Um.

Adapting to the times means recognising that sales of recorded music will continue to shrink. Why, then, give licences to services that don’t want to pay for streaming or pay just a tiny fraction of radio? Are they the new radio or not? It doesn’t make sense to me. It would be interesting to hear how a label using Spotify sees this one paying off somewhere along the line – Last.fm is not exactly a money-spinner.

Ultimately, as I don’t run a label I’m not the best person to talk about these things. But I can’t help asking the questions.

Concerning the UK figures, the fact that someone is making a fortune selling Celine Dion tickets does not necessarily help the record industry. He’s not going to pass out Christmas bonuses to all the labels and publishers in the UK because they are supposed to be part of the same industry, is he? The Stones sell out every tour but hardly dent the charts with the new recordings. Weird, but true.