Musicians ok with P2P

In ethical discussions about music file-sharing (to borrow from Jack Black’s line in the film School of Rock), kids will often explain their guilt-free file-sharing as a way of “sticking it to The Man” (“he” being the recording industry, which has sued thousands of file-sharers to date). Ethics aside for the moment, we’ve heard a lot from the recording industry so far, but very little from musicians (and kids will tell you the artists get only a small percentage of each CD’s price). The Pew Internet & American Life project actually got musicians’ views; it surveyed 2,793 of them, mostly with “day jobs,” MediaDailyNews reports, in what turned out to be the week’s biggest tech story. “The vast majority [of these musicians] do not see online file-sharing as a big threat to creative industries,” the study found (as quoted in the Washington Post’s round-up on this story). “Across the board, artists and musicians are more likely to say that the Internet has made it possible for them to make more money from their art than they are to say it has made it harder to protect their work from piracy or unlawful use,” according to the study, which also found that “two-thirds of artists say peer-to-peer file sharing poses a minor threat or no threat at all to them.” MediaDailyNews reported that “the Recording Artists Coalition, which represents musicians signed by major studio labels, sharply condemned [the Pews] report,” condemning its methodology (only 8% of Pew’s sample said they supported themselves entirely with their music). And so we have a more detailed picture now: Emerging musicians and garage bands have a very different view of file-sharers than that of established, high-profile ones. Now Pew needs to survey file-sharers and ask them what kinds of music they’re using the likes of BitTorrent and eDonkey to find!

Meanwhile, BNA Internet Law’s Michael Geist took the time to figure out the real impact of file-sharing, at least on the Canadian music industry (he writes for the Toronto Star): The record companies’ “loss claims are greatly exaggerated and … P2P is only marginally responsible for sales declines.” In a second article he reports that Canadian artists have not suffered financially from P2P.