Blame Elvis
The recording industry exists in a bubble that started in the fifties and still exists to this day. It starts with pop music. Sure, there were artists before Elvis, but his impact on the music business is a legacy that stays with us, creating an unsustainable belief in the power of music as a media and as a business. It's a background to our lives and colours our emotions.
It's built on fallacy and dreams and it's beautiful and crap all at the same time, because it speaks to our emotions.
And it cannot continue to exist in it's current form, simply because it is bloated beyond it's means to support itself.
The emotional baggage of music haunts us all to some degree, even politicians, who will not want to see the music industry die because secretly, some of them still want to be pop stars. Does this make sense? I'm trying to explain why there is such an attachment to music, why it's important that artists are allowed to make money, even shitloads of money.
It would be nice if Simon Cowell drove his Maybach into the Thames tomorrow, but it isn't going to happen as part of the model means people like him, moguls, as it were, are a part of the pop story. You can probably draw a line from Col Tom Parker, via Brian Epstein and Pete Waterman, all the way to Cowell. It would probably be a line made of glitter some of the way, rhinestones for part and almost certainly some of it would be made of cocaine.
How does this relate to piracy? Well, I think all the heartstring tugging will inevitably bring the worst kind of legislation against us, one that for all it's good intentions will penalise people that didn't do anything, while the so called freetard get away with what they're still getting away with.
I liked the idea that was banded about a while back of subsidising music downloads by adding a few quid a month to the fee you pay to an ISP. ISPs that sign up for this could advertise the fact that their users can download prosecution free, while other ISPs that don't sign up have to cut off users that download.
A fee like that would become invisible to most users, paying at the point of internet access. How you pass that money onto the artist is another problem.
Oh blimey, I haven't mentioned films and other stuff. Oh well. I'm sure someone will sort it all out, for the worst. Wibble.