The music industry has been content with blaming everyone else for its lack of vision and has been issuing the same arguments over and over again without much proof on its part and without addressing the numerous critics. Many artists, even established ones, are starting to wake up to new opportunities and make the best of them, but there are those who see it differently. U2 frontman Bono is one of them and has stirred quite a few people with his op-ed in the New York Times, in which he goes after ISPs which, he believes, are getting rich at the expense of budding artists while doing nothing to stop the scourge of file sharing.
“A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business,” he writes.
It certainly paints a bleak picture for struggling artists whose hopes and dreams are being squashed by the greed of the Internet service providers. But while aspiring songwriters are forced into a life of mediocrity and delusion and reduced “to write jing… (read more)