There's something eminently lovable about Frank Turner.
First of all, he's a protest singer, but he's not a socialist- a fact he is at pains to point out given the relative oddity of his position. Second, he regularly gets involved in slagging matches with his- how shall I put it?- leftier internet fans. Third, he's actually a pretty good musician.
Oh, and
he knew Prufrock before he was famous.
Turnere's latest foray into pissing off his fans/friends/everyone was a seemingly innocent re-tweet of a hilarious (and insightful) satirical
article in the
Daily Mash poking fun at file-sharing proponents that quickly got more heated.
Later, he gathered his thoughts and wrote
this rather measured refutation of the increasing numbers who not only refuse to pay for music, but don't even understand why it's necessary to do so in the first place.
It's all well-worth a read, but I've pulled a couple of key passages out for emphasis:
et's put it this way: recording isn't free, instruments aren't free, session players, producers, engineers, artists aren't free. My time isn't free either - I work hard and I expect to get paid for it. Maybe we are heading for a world in which all recorded music is free, but if so, be prepared for gig and T-shirt prices to rise.
This is a favoured claim of the anti-copyright movement: "musicians make all their money from touring anyway" "I won't buy the album but I'll buy a t-shirt instead" etc. The fact is that all record contracts aren't the same, and while many artists make no money from record sales, others rely on sales and advances to pay for tours. Other artists make music that simply doesn't translate to a live setting.
the idea that by stealing music from the internet you're somehow crusading for justice against the big bad record labels is absolute fucking bullshit and needs to be stamped out. Britney Spears and David Geffen aren't going to downsize their condo's [sic] because you didn't pay for a Fugazi album. The people hit first and foremost are the low-level workers in the industry and smaller or independent artists. Telling yourself otherwise is, in my opinion, more often than not a lame attempt to salve a guilty conscience.
Impeccable logic, again, and phrased so well that it just demands to be quoted.
Anybody who's even worked on the edge of the music industry (as I have for some years) can tell you that the number of people you deal with on a day-to-day basis is declining, while the number of actual working musicians seems to grow exponentially. Look at the massive lay-offs in EMI and Warner over the past couple of years, or the (hopefully temporary) demise of Touch & Go Records as a publisher of new music.
Telling yourself otherwise is, in my opinion, more often than not a lame attempt to salve a guilty conscience.
This is worth quoting again.
But it's point number three that hammers home the utterly bizarre logic of those who hold up the Pirate Bay et al. as crusaders of modern morality.
This brings me onto point three: most people don't know very much about the mechanics of the music industry, but feel qualified to theorize about its economics at length.
Give this man a prize and bag full of money. Now, I'm not suggesting for a second that a) all musicians are expert on the economics of the industry, or b) all musicians are in the same boat as Mr. Turner.
But you have to take a step back and ask yourself who you are prepared to put your trust in: the musicians who deal with record industry politics day in-day out, watching the cash flowing in and out of their bank accounts, or the faceless logician behind a laptop screen in Sweden? It should be a simple choice.
Now, to digress for a moment:
Having worked in the music industry for a few years, I do a fair bit about it, and I think illegal downloading is a bad thing. As a point of proof, find me any indie record store or independent artist who thinks that file-sharing is a boon for them and their career. QED.
This is broadly true, but not strictly true. Coming from a PR perspective, it's not too hard to identify the artists who do benefit from illegal downloading, and many of whom do little to discourage it.
It's hard to imagine Animal Collective's
Merriweather Post Pavillion making such a dent in the charts this year had it not been for massive blog buzz building all through late 2008. Ditto Person Pitch in 2007, or, let's just come out and say it- Girl Talk. Post-hardcore spazzes the Kidcrash were screwed over by their first label and few years ago, and have found the perfect way to get back at them: posting
their entire first album (and the rest) for free (illegal) download.
So I'd just add a caveat to Turner's argument, one that he kind of hints at making himself: that the benefit of copyright ownership and whatnot isn't just the economics of how many records you sell, it's the fact that you can control the superficial aspect of how your music is distributed.
If The Kidcrash want to post all their music online for free, it's their perogative. Nobody would begrudge them the right, and they may even make some money from it (though it's not their motivation). Frank Turner, however, is a working musician who would rather like to make a career of the thing that he does so well. And good luck to him.
Frank Turner's third album, Poetry Of The Deed
, is scheduled for release on September 7 (UK) via Xtra Mile and September 8 (US) via Epitaph.Download 'The Road' from
Poetry Of The Deed here.
