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Lily Allen, a UK singer whom nobody outside of the UK had heard of until she started shouting the odds about file sharing.She’s offering music from, among others, Jay-Z, Jefferson Airplane, The Specials and The Kinks. Admittedly, it’s just a quick look around, but it appears many of the artists whose works she’s distributing for free have no connection with EMI. Even if they did, remember EMI was recently claiming that it’s never authorized MP3s for distribution for publicity purposes. Uh oh“When Lily was first trying to get attention, she created a couple of mixtapes with a ton of songs from other artists … available as MP3 downloads, and mixing in her own tracks” This is a well-known tradition in some circles and a great way to get some attention. We’re all for it. But… it seems quite hypocritical of Ms. Allen to claim that file sharing is somehow evil and destroying the industry when she appears to be an active participant and used it to promote herself (oh my goodness! free music working as promotion!). According to the tracklisting of the second mixtape, it included 19 tracks by artists other than Lily Allen. Both mixtapes (mixtape 1 and mixtape 2) are available directly off of Lily’s website, LilyAllenMusic.com, which has a copyright notice at the bottom from EMI.She claims that people who make music available illegally should have their internet connections removed. Given how much the music industry was awarded from Jammie Thomas and Joel Tenenbaum for distributing significantly fewer songs… not only should Allen be kicked offline, but she should be fined too. Or am I missing something from the recording industry’s “education campaign” on this topic?
This week Lily Allen’s views on file-sharing have been the hot topic. While some agree with her calls to ’save’ the industry from a fate worse than death, others did not subscribe to the doomsday scenario. One of those is UK musician Dan Bull who has written a brilliant song-come-open letter to Miss Allen. We hope you enjoy it.
