People make better music when they do it for love

Last night I made some delicious sandwiches to bring to work today. Today I am at work and the sandwiches are in the fridge, being delicious. I hate when that happens. I even made them out of nice bread that I sliced myself with a bread knife. I need looking after. I miss my wife.

Tomorrow I'm being visited by the plasterer. See how close to completion the new bedroom in the sky is. Still no stairs. I'm hoping that will happen next week. No door either actually, but there is a window now so we can look in on the little boy sleeping without going in. How cool is that? It was my idea.

I'm going to rant about the music industry:

According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), online piracy "destroys local music". A case in point is apparently Spain. Spain "does not have laws in place to prevent illegal downloads", we are told. That's an odd phrase isn't it. Surely if they have no "laws in place to prevent illegal downloads", then downloads aren't "illegal". That is perhaps a matter of semantics. The point the IFPI is trying to make is that there is nothing to stop file sharing, and as a result local album sales have gone down 65% in five years.

Music sales are of course notoriously changeable, always have been. Also, file sharing didn't just spring up five years ago. It's been around much longer and it's not as popular now as it was five years ago. Music has always been shared anyway. When I was at collage we shared our music on cassette tape and played it on our walkmans. I found my Sony walkman when I was clearing out the loft recently. And, call me cynical, but why do they only mention "album" sales by "local artists". I don't suppose you have conveniently omitted to mention that other music hasn't suffered a fall in sales have you?

All this is beside the point anyway. The part I'm really interested in is this idea that music sharing "destroys local music". I'm not sure exactly what "local" means here, but lets ignore that for the moment and analyse their rhetoric. The IFPI has said that countries like Spain run the risk of becoming a "cultural desert". Hang on a minute, is the entertainment industry actually suggesting that it is responsible for our cultural sustainability? Think about it for a moment, the industry that manufactured such cultural giants as the Spice Girls, Boyzone, Girls Aloud, and Brittany Spears, are claiming we will lose these icons of modern art. Oh how awful! Don't get me wrong, these performers have a place, but cultural landmarks on the road to artistic excellence they are not.

Of course the industry will argue that they are talking about, not cultural giants like Brittany, but traditional music. I however find it difficult to imagine people downloading "Bouzouki Island Favourites" and "Castanet Party Classics" on their X-Box. It couldn't be that castanets and bouzouki classics sales are dipping due to them falling out of fashion could it?

Of course, the real point here is much simpler. It doesn't matter what the entertainment industry believes or tells us, music will never stop being produced. One could argue that less money will be made from selling music if people are allowed to share it freely. That is of course the only real concern the music industry has. Despite claims to the contrary, they really don't care whether Spain becomes a "cultural desert" or not. They only care how much money they can squeeze out of that desert.

The fact is people will always make music, even if no one wants to pay them for it. That's the thing about music you see, people do it for fun because, well because it's fun. And the really important point is this; people who make music because they want to make music, and not because they want to be rich or famous, make better music.