Prompt's TechBlog

Gordon Brown pledged to crack down on music piracy in his pre-Budget report this week, saying that prison sentences of as much as ten years could be introduced for persistent online and offline sellers of illegal music.

But while the music industry claims it is losing 20% of its annual revenues through piracy, its relationship with the pirates is far from clear-cut. The big record labels may not like to see dodgy copies of the James Blunt album being flogged at car boot sales, but many smaller labels see some pirates not as enemies, but as friends.

Take the explosion of 'mp3 blogs', written by music fans about their favourite artists. Every post includes one or more mp3s that the bloggers upload for readers to download - free of charge, and in infringement of all known laws of copyright and distribution.

While a few mp3 bloggers have received cease-and-desist notices from music industry lawyers, many more are receiving more welcome correspondence in the form of preview albums and tracks, and implied licence to make these tracks available free of charge to their readers.

mp3 blogs are becoming an important - and free - marketing channel for the 'long tail' of non-mainstream artists and indie record labels, by promoting them farther and wider than each individual label's marketing budget could possibly achieve.

For the moment, record labels and mp3 bloggers exist in symbiotic harmony, but this may soon change with the increasing popularity of 'mp3 blog aggregators' like Hype Machine, which let people search the entire mp3 blogosphere for free music. Hype Machine is starting to look more like the old Napster every day, and that can't be a good sign for either the music industry or the mp3 bloggers.


tags: music piracy | mp3 blogs | hype machine