It all began with a blog post on MySpace—A condemnation of illegal music piracy. Lily Allen, the 24 year old British singer who put out her second Album ‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’ in April, is took up the fight that record executives have been battling for years. Unfortunately, she did not change the music industry, and what followed was probably not the response she was looking for.On September 14, Allen posted “I think music piracy is having a dangerous effect on British music, but some really rich and successful artists like Nick Mason from Pink Floyd and Ed O'Brien from Radiohead don't seem to think so.” Allen promised to contact fellow British artist to help the British music industry. It was one response though that spawned the next generation of her fight.
After a counter response from, the particularly outspoken Matthew Bellamy of English rock band Muse, Allen set up ‘It’s Not Alright’ on BlogSpot (http://idontwanttochangetheworld.blogspot.com/ ). The blog featured the artists who had responded to Allen’s request for their opinion. As of Tuesday last week responses had come from Tinchy Stryder, Gary Barlow, a couple of the boys from Keane, producer Mark Ronson and James Blunt including 16 more responses, supporting the cause she was fighting.
At this point, various members of the record industry were rebutting Allen’s cause. But it was when Allen posted a response from 50 Cent to music piracy that her argument lost a lot of steam. Unfortunately for her, she had copied the paragraph response from a Tech Dirt (http://techdirt.com/) without accrediting it. Michael Masnick, who had originally written the 50 Cent article, spoke to TorrentFreak who picked up Allen’s oversight, had their piece to say “The fact that she is trying to claim that such copying is bad, while doing it herself suggests something of a double standard, unfortunately”. This, of course, prompted a response from Ms Allen, “I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS [sic] THAT I WASNT TRYING TO PASS OF THOSE WORDS AS MY OWN.”
The disagreement escalated when a couple of mixtapes were found on Allen’s site. All of which contained copyrighted music, which Allen was distributing free of charge. Allen defended these saying ‘"I made those mixtapes five years ago. I didn't have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then.’
At this point though, the reason for her blog had become complicatedly entangled in one big ironic snag. Within days the blog was shut down, with Allen stating, “I'm proud of the fact that that I've been involved with this debate but I'm passing the baton on to other artists."
Unfortunately, what could have been a good undertaking by an artist to combat a problem in this industry has turned out to be one horrible mess. Allen did have some good points though. Preventing the Simon Cowell puppet nation and the same old crap circulating on terrestrial radio while still promoting new music and preventing the rampant job losses she has seen at her record label EMI as some examples. Despite this, Allen’s career as piracy thwarter wont be going any further.
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