Canadian Artist: P2P Great if it Brings People to Concerts

Indie folk-rock singer Daniel Mangan says he “doesn’t mind” people sharing his music online it if it means they’ll attend one of his concerts and “have a real face to face, human interaction.”

Canadian Indie folk-rock singer Daniel Mangan is one of the growing number of music artists who’ve embraced file-sharing as an opportunity to reach new fans rather than as an enemy who needs to be defeated at all costs.

Unlike UK pop singer Lily Allen, who blasted P2P as a “disaster” for emerging artists and therefore a principal reason why the UK govt needs to institute a “three-strikes” crackdown on illegal file-sharing, Mangan sees it as a means to reach out to people and convince them to attend one of his concerts or buy some of his band merchandise.

“I don’t mind people sharing my music, if downloading or pirating a digital format of a song brings someone to a gig and then they have a real face to face, human interaction, maybe they bring a friend, maybe they buy a t-shirt, that’s great for me,” he told the Telegraph on the verge of his European tour. “Even though the music industry has changed so much and people are buying less CD’s, I refuse to believe that people don’t want to support art that they believe in.”

He notes that despite what the record labels say artists are still able to make a living playing music, and that the number of “mid level bands” is burgeoning.

“It used to be that you were hugely famous or you were nobody and now there is a middle class of musicians who are able to make a career and pay a mortgage, maybe raise a few kids, without ever being hugely famous,” he adds.

Isn’t that what’s most important? An artist is able to share his work with the world and yet still make enough to live comfortably.

P2P has democratized content distribution, allowing artists like Mangan to gain fans and stimulate precisely the sort of direct revenue stream needed for them to make a living. Instead of a 9:1 split with record labels seeing the bulk of physical album sales, artists earn the reverse when it comes to live performances.

In fact, the UK has seen a rise in artists’ earnings for live performances that mirrors the decline in record label revenue for the sales of recorded music.

Talk about being ahead of the curve.

Record labels have long been a necessary evil for artists to reach music fans, but all that has changed with the advent of P2P. Now they have become obstacles between the two in order to try and maintain the sort of decades-old monopoly on content distribution that ensured maximum profits.

Change is long overdue.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

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