Jamie Cullum: I Download Music Illegally Too

Says best way to fight P2P is by offering services that are “so sophisticated and so comprehensive that people don’t need to download stuff for free.”

UK pop singer Jamie Cullum had a few interesting comments to make about illegal file-sharing recently in an interview with the Mail Online.

Cullum, who has been making music since he was just 13yo, says that though he’s sympathetic to both sides of the debate being both a music fan as well as an artist, that there’s little society can do to fight it.

He oftentimes turns to P2P to get an album otherwise not available, but stresses that he buys a legal copy once it’s officially released.

“I’m a music consumer of the highest order, and I spend an awful lot of my time looking for music, buying music, downloading music legally and illegally,” he says. “I make no bones about it – if there’s some Thom Yorke EP floating around and it’s not out until next week, then I’ll download it illegally. However, the following week I’ll buy it because I want the artwork, and I want to see the notes and to find out where it was recorded and all the rest.”

He doesn’t think punishing music fans is the solution to the problem being that it would ensure people like him who still spend a great deal of money on purchasing music legally.

“The problem is, we’ve gone too far,” he adds. “You can’t start punishing people – you’d be punishing people like me, who spends thousands of pounds a year online, because I illegally downloaded something from a blog.”

Numerous studies have also shown that file-shares by in large are the biggest consumers of music.

According to the most recent UK survey, two-thirds of those who illegally download music spent an average of £75 ($123 USD) a year on music versus £44 ($72 USD) by those that don’t (10% buy a “lot more,” 16% a little more, and 47% “about the same).

Another worth mentioning is “Consumer Culture in Times of Crisis,” a study conducted by the the BI Norwegian School of Management, the largest business school in Norway and the second largest in all of Europe, which found that file-sharers actually buy 10 times as much music as they download for free.

Cullum rightly realizes the best solution to it all is not disconnecting file-sharers as proposed by Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, but rather to create viable download services that make illegal downloading unnecessary.

“‘We need to make the download systems so sophisticated and so comprehensive that people don’t need to download stuff for free,” he says. “Developments like Spotify and Sky Songs are great ideas, and great business models. If you could get things with ease then you wouldn’t have to go scrabbling around on some dodgy site to get it.”

Exactly. Licensing music for use in new services has always been a problem, one that keeps coming up year after year, yet never gets solved.

Too bad his record label won’t let hum run the helm for a while, at least then it’d have somebody sane in charge for a change.

Stay tuned.

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