How Long

I cheered when Napster made monkeys of Metallica. Last week, though, a plea from an independent record label made me think again Last week, I received a promotional CD of Ma Fleur, the new album by Cinematic Orchestra, a group on the independent label Ninja Tune. Before I'd even played it (it's very good by the way), I was hooked by the blurb on the sleeve Usually, this is the bit of legal boilerplate where the label informs you that illegal downloading is outright gangsterism and anyone who practises it will be dragged outside to be shot like a dog, after which their head will be exhibited on a spike outside the BPI headquarters as a warning to others But this one is different. "Before you copy, burn or upload these recordings," it begins, "please take a moment to think about what you're doing and what you're not doing. You are not 'sticking it to the man'. You are not 'striking a blow against outdated copyright laws'. You are not 'liberating content from the corporations'. Nor are you 'promoting our records for us'. You are making it much harder for the musicians in Cinematic Orchestra to make anything like a living wage for creating the music which is good enough to give to friends and associates." Whether this approach will work remains to be seen (last year, the electronic duo Matmos, accompanied each promo copy of their album The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast with a witty, handwritten Post-It imploring recipients not to upload it to a filesharing network, to no avail) but it raises sticky questions about the ethics of illegal filesharing Of course, the easy answer is that all unlicensed downloading is copyright theft, ergo wrong, but that's not how many music fans think anymore. When an 18-year-old Northeastern University student called Shawn Fanning launched Napster, the first P2P filesharing software, in 1999, he triggered a sea change in the consumption of music Any qualms about the morality of taking gigabytes of music without paying were quashed by the industry's heavy-handed response. Famously, Metallica filed a lawsuit against Napster. Fronted by anus-faced drummer Lars Ulrich, it became a PR disaster, pitting a multimillionaire rock band against its own fans. I don't even like Metallica, but I was tempted to get Napster and download their entire back catalogue just to annoy Ulrich. Napster was forced to shut down its network in July 2001 and pay a total of $36m to copyright owners, subsequently relaunching as a legal subscription service. But its Robin Hood reputation defined the moral battle lines for years to come. As new services such as Soulseek and Limewire sprang up, millions of music fans downloaded free music while telling themselves that the only people they were hurting were greedy executives and anus-faced drummers Now, as Ninja Tune say, many of the old justifications ring hollow, especially when it comes to independent artists. You want a hit track without having to buy the whole lousy album? Legal services such as the iTunes store offer ever-swelling libraries of individual tracks. You want to try before you buy? Many musicians offer free previews on their websites or MySpace pages. Filesharing raises the artist's profile? True, it can stoke demand for live shows, and for licensing to TV, movies and advertisers, but word-of-mouth promotion doesn't work if you're giving someone an album instead of just telling them about it. According to Ninja Tune's Will Ashon, who wrote the Ma Fleur text, the difference between an independent album losing money and breaking even can be as little as 1000 copies At the same time, filesharing has ballooned. I know passionate music fans with decent wages who have never paid for a legal download and haven't bought an album in years. It is a habit so established that they don't even think twice Of course, there are still many songs you cannot buy. Out-of-print albums such as Dennis Wilson's legendary Pacific Ocean Blue, not to mention countless lost B-sides, wouldn't be heard at all if not by illegal means. But I wonder how many filesharers discriminate in this way. How many will download some long-deleted EP track but not a new release, or a major-label megastar but not a struggling independent? At the same time, I wonder what it's like for an underground musician who sees his well-reviewed album remain in the red because most fans have taken his music for free I'm in the privileged position of receiving free copies of new releases for review (although I still buy plenty of other music) and I wouldn't be so self-righteous or, let's face it, so unrealistic as to suggest that shame-faced filesharers down tools, but it's time that those with an interest in independent music exercised some discretion I'll leave the last word to Ninja Tune: "By all means pirate the latest corporate spew from major label central. But don't pretend it's the same thing as copying this, because one day, when we're all gone and all that's left is two or three giant multinational conglomerates putting out lowest-common-denominator bollocks, you'll wish you hadn't."