Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Lily Allen Speaks Out on File Sharing

Last week, British recording artist Lily Allen posted a blog entry on her MySpace page in reaction to a recent article about the Featured Artists Coalition, in the UK Times Online. I think this quote from Pink Floyd's Nick Mason offended her the most: "File sharing means a new generation of fans for us."

Allen's response to this is thought-provoking: "Last week in an article in the Times these guys from huge bands said file sharing music is fine. It probably is fine for them. They do sell-out arena tours and have the biggest Ferrari collections in the world. For new talent though, file sharing is a disaster as it's making it harder and harder for new acts to emerge." Later on comes my favorite quote: "the more difficult it is for new artists to make it, the less new artists you'll see and the more British music will be nothing but puppets paid for by Simon Cowell."

See the whole controversy unfold:
Lily Allen's Myspace blog post
Lily Allen's blog "It's Not Alright" created to discuss the issue further.
Radiohead's Ed O'Brien agrees with Lily Allen
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Thursday, September 03, 2009

More New Songs, and Another Option for Indies

In case you've been curious as to why I haven't blogged much lately, I've got a whole batch of new songs recorded. I am also trying out a new service called "Gimmesound" (www.gimmesound.com.) Fans can download songs for free, and artists share in ad revenue. It's an intriguing model, and I'm interested in seeing how it pans out. I will let my faithful readers know!

You can find my page at http://www.gimmesound.com/MichaelJJohnson. Take a listen, and download what you like!

There is a batch of new songs, as well as higher-bitrate versions of songs I did earlier in the year. The last seven songs on the player are a series of prepared guitar pieces I recorded. I am still mixing several more, and will probably have them posted by next week.

I have decided to collectively call this new batch of songs "Manifesto," after the "Artist 2.0 Manifesto" I posted several months ago. All the files are high quality VBR mp3's, which means a bit longer download times.

I've always been curious as to the effectiveness of an ad-supported model. We'll see.
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