Which Artists Support Music Swapping?

jtauber asks: "With RIAA's new campaign to 'educate' people that unauthorized downloads of music are illegal and with the range of artists who are endorsing the campaign, I thought it would be interesting to ask the question: which well-known artists (if any) go against the RIAA and are _in favour_ of music swapping? Certainly many unsigned bands like my own encourage it, but what about those signed with major record labels?" We did a question along a similar veign not too long ago, except its focus was non-RIAA Record Labels. What artists are you aware of (popular or not) who have come out in favor of music-swapping?

Comments

U2

[bhize]

BONO: "My feeling," he adds, "is that it is cool for people to share our music -- as long as no one is making money from the process. We tell people who come to our concerts that they can tape the shows if they want. I think it is cool that people are so passionate about our music"

THE EDGE: The terror of online song-trading and bootlegging that has occurred in the wake of Napster is not something the members of U2 are losing any sleep over. "In fact, as long as fans aren't being exploited and bootleggers aren't raking in huge money from the practice, it's a part of the music business they've come to accept."

Bj�rk does

[dragonfly_blue]

She had the most interesting things to say about why she wrote her album, Vespertine. It's an amazing work, I've never heard anything like it before.

"...Its also like a love affair with a laptop. I wanted to make modern chamber music. And it's a love affair with two things: the home and laptops, basically saying that a hundred years ago the most ideal music situation was in the home, where people would play harps for each other, or tell each other stories. And in the middle of the century it became the opposite, the most ideal music situation was something like Woodstock, with many hundreds of thousands of people hearing the same song in the same mud pit, having the same euphoric experience, and the target, sonically, was to make a stack of amplifiers that could reach China. I think we've come full circle and the most ideal music situation now, through Napster and thr ough the Internet and downloading and DVD, is back to the home...."

In another interview I read, she said she composed the album with the idea in her mind of her fans sharing the album through the web, and wrote much of the lyrics as a kind of "whispered secret" for listeners to enjoy. I think she's one of the few artists who realizes that without her fans, she wouldn't be where she is today.

Chuck D. has also seemed to be fairly clueful about the web, although I'm not sure how he feels about P2P apps.