mjn | bass

Read the article: Billy Bragg On Piracy: “A war that no one can win.”

I agree with Bragg. It’s destructive to try to shut down people who are trading music amongst themselves. Trading is how people get turned on to new music, and has helped spawn lucrative careers for many artists. The “enemy”, or the “competition” if you will, are the file sharing sites. It’s just good business to offer a better experience than the competition. That goes for any industry out there. And now especially the music industry.

His last paragraph sums things up beautifully:

However, we will not be able to marginalise the pirates until we can offer accessible, easy to use, fairly priced alternative business models that people will actually want to buy their music from. While we may never be able to sink The Pirate Bay, the challenge we face is to make it look boring, shoddy and unreliable.