No Rock And Roll Fun

THE HENLEY CENTRE: The interesting conclusion to Don Henley's thinky piece in the Washington Post [registration required, but you can pretend you're from Sao Tome et Principe] is that "artists must be allowed to join with the labels" (our itallics) in the battle against file sharing. We were looking forward to reading this as the first muttering we'd seen on the web suggested that Henley had something radical or now to say; in effect, though, he's merely pushing an incredibly conservative line - sure, there's problems with the way the big labels treat music as a commodity, but, hey, we just need to teach them to be a bit more respectful of our art. He even suggests that the artist's place in the new struggle is testifying in front of politicans in Washington. There's no suggestion that what might be best for the artist would be seizing the opportunities presented by technology to step outside the label system altogether; that what is needed is less regulation by Washington. Instead, it's 'let's fix the system up again'.