these files are your files aka f - Radio Clash Podcast These files are your files, aka Fuck You Very Much Lily Radio Clash Music Mashup Podcast brings you the best in eclectic tunes, mashups and remixes from around the world. Since 2004, we've been bringing you the freshest and most innovative music from a diverse range of genres and cultures. Join us on our musical journey as we explore the sounds of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Discover new music and be inspired by the mashup of musical styles that only Radio Clash can provide. Subscribe now to elevate your musical experience!

These files are your files, aka Fuck You Very Much Lily

EDIT: Brilliant video by Dan Bull responding to Lily.

OK the land of Twitter (I twittered about the whole affair on the 16th – keep up at the back there :-P) and now blogs has been entertained by the latest shite to fall out of Lily Allen’s mouth – this time her hypocrisy regarding file sharing.

You see It’s Alright for her to share mixtapes of full songs (not 30 seconds!) of other’s music, her Myspace demos or even copy articles without attribution, but apparently she supports the governmental ‘3 strikes’ law to cut off file sharers.

She turned up to support a meeting of ‘minds’ in music at Air Studios, organised by Ed O’Brien of Radiohead and the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) – where they agreed that rather being cut off as per the people’s bandwidth should be throttled to 56k-level speeds for file sharing,. Oh that’s alright then 😛

The buck doesn’t just pass to Lily, surprisingly the likes of Billy Bragg (sorry Billy but your beloved Woody Guthrie must be spinning in his grave, he understood more about the concept of public ‘commons’ than you ever will) supported such a measure as did such intellectual alumni and thinkers:

    Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason
    George Michael
    Annie Lennox
    Patrick Wolf
    Tim Rice-Oxley
    Ed O’Brien
    David Arnold
    Guy Chambers
    Sandie Shaw

I eagerly await the full list so I can make sure I can sanction all the fuckers and never pay them a penny…definitely a case of ‘I’m alright jack’ and bloated irrelevant rock stars not really understanding the real issues behind downloading and file sharing…as several people have pointed out, the problem of widely downloaded tracks ‘by the kids’ will not be bothering most of these acts anyway, being either bland corporate mulch or being severely over the hill.

They don’t seem to understand that the whole issue was created by an industry that refused techological and legal change, screwed consumers repeatedly, expected special copyright laws, special treatment and arcane kickbacks that other industries do not have, and that there’s very little proof that like home taping before it that downloading really affects sales – in fact my experience with blogs, podcasts, torrents and P2P et al is it actually creates sales.

And it does tend to support the idea that musicians should keep well away from things they don’t understand…and if said acts pretend to be radical or daring in future I will laugh in their faces. Sorry, you are corporate cock-sucking bloated whores shilling for an industry whose death (or at the very least radical change) is necessary for some semblance or creativity and sanity to return.

As Techdirt later pointed out, as did Boing Boing that pointing a finger at Lily’s hypocrisy, or her using ‘rare’ ska samples on her records (her first LP is full of them, I do hope they were all cleared?) isn’t helpful, even if she did moan “i made those mixtapes 5 years ago, i didn’t have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then… “ Baroness Scotland-style. It’s harder and harder to work as an artist in the modern copyright sphere, things such as free mixtapes and mashups and sharing files (transformed or otherwise) for free SHOULD be possible for a 21st century artist to do. And like Lily, they DO, but you would hope they then have the sense not to cut the strings for anyone else coming up who would like to do the same. The current position of copyright is untenable…rather than slapping Lily’s wrists (oh OK, go on for a bit, it’s fun!) it shouldn’t be an issue for people to share content of all types, and the laws against that will have a freezing effect from the bloated rock stars to the kids just starting their music careers. It’s bad, and will affect everyone.

And reading Lily’s Myspace post about EMI, the company whose Cease and Desisted creativity in the mashup world and mismanaged by Guy Hands, are apparently losing jobs, well I cry for them, I really do.

At least it isn’t all bad, Lily is apparently leaving the music industry. Can I hold you to that, Lil? Maybe she’ll go into politics 😛 And she also deleted the blog posts that started all this – toys, meet outside of pram, pram, exit toys.

EDIT: Best response ever to this whole thing (via Bush No. 10)

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