Anyone who's been reading the music press over the past few weeks should have seen the rush from artists to come out either in favour or against file-sharing and music piracy. Loudest (and most whiney) in the anti-piracy camp have been arch-Mockney hypocrite Lily Allen and, perhaps the man you would be most in favour of pirates as he spends most of his time dressed as one, the lanky-tantrum-thrower Patrick Wolf.
My own opinions should be pretty obvious to anyone, I think that file-sharing (legal and illegal) is hugely in favour of the artist. Frankly there are thousands of artists working today because of it. Wolf and Allen would like to hark back to some imagined halcyon days when musicians were rich and everyone respected their work. Those days were different - there were far fewer artists around trying to peddle their wares, those who were around worked damn hard to promote their own work (rather than letting the myspace hype do it for them), and more often than not they did a few good things and slipped into obscurity (or back to their day job).
Anyway a response to all the toss has been published and it pretty much says everything else I want to say, have a listen:
Dan Bull - Dear lily (an open letter to Lily Allen)
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