So this week, a court in the US ruled in favour of a number of large record labels and ordered Limewire to cease providing their software and take down the Gnutella server which has for over a decade been one of the most popular methods for people wishing to illegally file share music.
Now I'm not going to ever pretend that at some point somewhere in the past, many years ago I didn't use Limewire, because I hold my hands up, I did. But the dawn of iTunes along with things like Pandora, last.fm and Spotify gsve the consumer a legal means of listening to music and then purchasing it...if they liked what they heard. It's the route I took.
Only in the past couple of years have I become so acutely aware of how badly illegal file sharing hurts independent artists in fact I have a number of friends who are musicians and the thought of people stealing from them and preventing them earning a living from their talent really sickens me.
Let's also be very clear, just because an artist is signed to a major record label, it doesn't mean they earn a huge amount of money from each record...if you don't believe me, go and have a search online for recording contracts and the percentages artists receive for Recording Royalties and Mechanical Royalties and the Deductions records labels make.
So in my view, Limewire's demise is a truly great day for music but I'm not naive enough to believe that people won't find another way to share music, I just hope it gets the same injunction slapped upon it, the future of music and talented artists depends upon it.
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