ozsource Australia

Matt Bellamy talks about his views on the Piracy issue with Lily Allen on Lily's Myspace page with a few concepts and insights of his own.

Both artists are pretty switched on and respected individuals, producing some of the finest music in recent years.  I have always had a soft spot for Lily's witty and lyrical satire in her releases and Muse's latest album, is probably one of my all time favourite CD's

Matt's ideas are not new, the concept of ISP's as a media carrier have been thrown around before but unfortunately nothing has ever come to fruition as a result.

Lily Allen Writes

The long and short of it is, even before this economic downturn Piracy has been affecting all areas of entertainment, except maybe theatre. CD sales, Film DVD sales, book sales , TV DVD sales, everything....
My own label EMI laid off thousands last year. I don't care so much about the high-ups (and by the way they're always the last to go - what a surprise) but the people who are going out are the young ones, the life blood basically. They're the ones that go first, , I've seen it. And the same is happening in TV and film. Why do you think you are just getting Terminator 6 and Harry Potter 7 instead of exciting new voices? Because the young voices are not there anymore. Do you care about that, or do you just want to watch and listen to the products of the last generation? Or do you want a voice that is heard and can make a difference?

Matt Bellamy writes

My current opinion is that file sharing is now the norm.  This cannot be changed without an attack on perceived civil liberties which will never go down well.  The problem is that the ISPs making the extreme profits (due to millions of broadband subscriptions) are not being taxed by the copyright owners correctly and this is a legislation issue.  Radio stations and TV stations etc have to pay the copyright owners (both recording and publishing) a fee for using material they do not own.

I agree with Matt's ideas concerning ISP's paying media royalties based on bandwidth allocation - It would stop the Piracy issue almost immediately and File-sharing would just be another media stream.  The Greed factor from the major Record labels needs to be changed or controlled to compensate such a concept though, or the same issues will happen all over again.  The media landscape is a vastly changing environment and ideas like these could be made to benefit both artists and consumers alike.

Read more on Lily Allens Myspace. Lily has also setup a blog on the issue.