Future of the Left, future of music

I was asked on Twitter yesterday if I was going to say anything about the UK Music advert from Monday's Guardain, which repeated (making it clear it was with permission, of course - Feargal isn't going to make a rookie mistake like Lily Allen) a blog post from Andy Falkous on Future Of The Left's MySpace blog.

It was an odd choice for UK Music to use to make its case - sure, you can see the idea of taking a smaller act, a struggling band, and sharing their frustration at the new shape of selling music. Somewhat surprisingly, I don't think the advert actually even bothered to mention the band's name, though, and just shared the full URL of the original MySpace post. Given that UK Music had probably spent more on this advert than all the promotional spend on Future Of The Left records ever, it seems a bit churlish to have not given the band a bit of a bigger mention.

But it's also odd that UK Music used a MySpace blog to make its point - for didn't MySpace build its business on wanton disregard of copyright? Oh, sure, after it had built a userbase it went legitimate, cleaned up its act and licensed in all directions. But there wouldn't be a MySpace business if its founders hadn't adopted a blind eye to the letter of copyright law in the first place. Perhaps UK Music thinks what it is doing is rejoicing over a repenting sinner, rather than suggesting it's okay to do what you like, providing you get your house in order once you've built your business. Because that would be a strange message.

Now, I love Future Of The Left, but the problem with Andy's post is that it merely reflects the problem the major labels are having - he's trying to work in a digitally-connected world using a model established to cope with the limitations of a physical product.

Most of his concerns seem to be about the leaking of the album before it was due to be released. Upsetting, certainly, but that's not a problem caused by filesharing, even if filesharing exacerbates the effect. The leaking - the original leak - must have come from someone working in the wider music business (there's no suggestion that cat burglars are lifting tapes from recording studios), which would seem to be the sort of thing that UK Music could be sorting out within its own ranks.

But it's not just people in the music industry leaking records; it's the business model that the labels and UK Music are trying to cling to that makes leaking possible. Why are you collecting tracks until you have enough to fill a 12 inch disc rotating at 33 and a third before you release them? And if you must work in "albums" of tracks, why would you leave them sitting around for ages before putting them up for sale? Don't you think that this gap between creation and distribution is just opening a window for leaking? (Although I suppose if you had an open window, it wouldn't be a leak. But you get my drift.)

More to the point, though, is this bit:

I'm not angry (in fact I
don't blame you, unless you leaked it, in which case I WILL KILL YOU),
just a little worried that the record we made will get lost amongst
the debris and leave us playing shows like we just weathered at the
laughably bad Camden Crawl this last weekend - fifteen people and a
world of disillusion.*

It doesn't give me any great pleasure to say this, but if you're only able to scrape together an audience of fifteen in Camden at the weekend, your actual problem isn't really that people are filesharing your album.