No Rock And Roll Fun

DON'T STEAL MUSIC, MMMKAY: Music teaching in British schools is in a very poor state - the few schools that have the spare cash to buy instruments find themselves so hamstrung by the demands of a central curriculum and constant testing, striving for the place in the meaningless league tables which can mean the difference between thriving and closure for a place, that kids don't get much time to actually use them. So we're a little bit surprised* that a company like EMI thinks that music lessons would be better spent teaching children that it's wrong to share music on the internet than actually encouraging them to learn how to play instruments with which to make new recordings:

While the Arts Council is planning a programme of visits for schools to national musical organisations such as the London Symphony Orchestra and the English National Opera, EMI said today: "We would like to see schools teaching copyright awareness so that pupils understand its importance not only to those contemplating music as a career, but to society generally."
EMI is planning a conference for teachers on the subject and working on lesson plans to explain copyright properly.

Of course, with no new musicians coming along, we guess EMI would then be free to just concentrate on exploiting its back catalogue - which would explain the extra importance the BPI and Hunky Matt Wells place on trying to get mechanical copyright terms extended. There'll be no new music in ten years... they need to keep the old stuff.

* - of course, we're not really. They're rubbish.