Bragg: Online piracy hurting new artists
Billy Bragg says new artists prevented from big break in industry by online music piracy
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By Adam Leveridge. |  |
Tuesday, 08, Dec 2009 04:02
By Kelvin Goodson.
New artists are being prevented from becoming full-time musicians by online music piracy, Billy Bragg has said.
The singer-songwriter told a central London audience today that illegal filesharing means that new artists get a worse deal from record labels.
"Younger artists, who themselves fileshare, appreciate how it's a form of promotion, but then they are faced with deals from record companies that are frequently 360 deals," Bragg told inthenews.co.uk with reference to deals that see labels take a slice of all of an artist's activities and not just record sales.
"If you want in you've got to sign everything to them," he continued.
Emerging artists are often so desperate to sign a record deal that they don't think about their future rights over their music, the 'Bard of Barking' added.
He went on to say that the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), of which Bragg is a board member, wants to "protect musicians from themselves" by educating them about the consequences of these deals.
The sheer range of platforms now offered to emerging artists by the internet can also make breaking through more difficult.
Bragg told the Westminster eForum and Media Forum keynote seminar the Future of Content Online: "Everything is harder for new acts, and the big problem is the path to success has become very diffuse; there are so many platforms. It was so much more straight forward when I was doing it."
He explained that while established artists like him could easily create an online presence, new talent is "going to suffer" unless it can find its audience through the web.
Bragg suggested that an "artist-to-fan model" of promoting and selling music could be the answer to emerging acts making a living in the digital age, but that better filters would be needed to bring artist and audience together.
Music piracy is a major issue at the moment with the government having unveiled plans in its digital economy bill to cut repeated fileshares off from the internet.