Paul McGuinness thinks you are killing art.

In the most recent issue of Rolling Stone, Paul McGuinness, manager for the near-geriatric Bono and U2, plots out his reasoning of the fall of the recording industry and what is to be done to make it viable again…viable again for him, the large record companies that have dominated the industry for most of its existence, and the artists whose creation he seems so desperate to protect. Forgive me if I doubt his intentions as being anything beyond protecting his meal ticket, and why shouldn’t he, I know I would. It’s his disingenuous attempt to expand the argument to the wider world of art that bothers me.

Art and it’s production is under threat, Mr McGuinness tells us:

“Indigenous music industries from Spain to Brazil are collapsing”

Collapsing?!? My god, if something isn’t done soon, than how will “indigenous” peoples make music?  How will “indigenous” people of Spain produce music without the guiding hand of Time Warner? Will all the little people of the world still sing their songs if Mr McGuinness can’t whet his beak? Jesus Tap Dancing Christ.

and

“A study endorsed by trade unions says Europe’s creative industries could lose more than a million jobs in the next five years”

Well, a union backed study should be completely objective right? Hmm, a study back by the union while they were trying to push through legislation in Europe to strengthen copyright and piracy laws. Just how was this cataclysm of the arts community calculated? Somewhere near the dramatic cows ass that the data came out of I’m sure.

So why the fall? He places most of the blame on ISPs who allow all of us to file share. He thinks they should be sharing their profits with the recording industry, which he seems to think are swelling because people are trading Joshua Tree online without paying for it:

“Let’s get real: Do people want more bandwidth to speed up their e-mails or to download music and films as rapidly as possible?”

I know that I need more bandwidth for online gaming, streaming movies on netflix, and online apps like the ones I use every 5 minutes at my day job (like online seminars and training, customer database contact and management software, and diagnostic programs), but who am I.

The whole argument basically is constructed to support his trumpeting of subscription services (he mentions Spotify 3 times, so I can only imagine that he is financially tied to it) or, in his wildest dreams, profit sharing with the blood sucking ISPs that are stealing all his lunch money. He goes so far as to lament all of the influence that Telcoms have in government, that it’s because they have lined congressional pockets that they aren’t being strung up on behalf of the poor ‘ol record companies, who are just trying to spread the art around. Forgive me if I don’t shed any tears. Let it burn. I don’t care. How will art be made without the music industry heavy hitters? The same way that it was made before and during their reign…by people who want to make music out of love and enjoyment for the art form.

One last addendum to this rant; The artwork that accompanies Mr McGuinness’s article is that of a vulture, consuming music notes while sitting on a guiar neck. Who is this supposed to depict? The ISP that gets the intertubes into my house? No, It would seem to me that it’s us, the consumers that they are representing there. By not forking over cash to the record companies, we are preventing them from nurturing the next generation of great musical talent, because there is no way that musicians could develop their voice without a gulf stream 5 and champagne. We are apparently killing art. I doubt we have that kind of power, and I’m pretty sure that people have made art under more stressful conditions.