14 DAY TRIAL // The music industry has been content with blaming everyone else for its lack of vision and has been issuing the same arguments over and over again without much proof on its part and without addressing the numerous critics. Many artists, even established ones, are starting to wake up to new opportunities and make the best of them, but there are those who see it differently. U2 frontman Bono is one of them and has stirred quite a few people with his op-ed in the New York Times, in which he goes after ISPs which, he believes, are getting rich at the expense of budding artists while doing nothing to stop the scourge of file sharing.
"A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business," he writes.
It certainly paints a bleak picture for struggling artists whose hopes and dreams are being squashed by the greed of the Internet service providers. But while aspiring songwriters are forced into a life of mediocrity and delusion and reduced "to write jingles," the ISPs are raking it in.
"Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world," he ends his plea. One can only hope.
Luckily, Bono sees hope yet and finds a great example in an unlikely candidate. By his own account, we should all be learning a thing or two in how to deal with troublesome pirates from China, who's "ignoble effort to suppress online dissent" proves "that it’s perfectly possible to track content." If China, home of the world's largest Internet population, can monitor and restrict access for its citizens to all manner of 'illegal' content, it should be perfectly feasible for ISPs all over the world to do it as well, despite their claims otherwise.
With more than two decades of successful songwriting for U2, it's to be expected that Bono would write a convincing piece of fiction. And, indeed, he doesn't let us down this time around. The only issue is that he's presenting his claims as facts even as numerous accounts show new artists embracing or at least coming to terms that piracy is now a fact of life and learning how to not only cope with it but use it for their own advantage by using peer to peer networks as great and free avenues for promotion.