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

Do they have a choice?

[anthony_dipierro]

It's quite irrelevant what most popular artists think, since they don't own the copyright on their recordings.

There are lots, for live music

[mikemulvaney]

There are a ton of bands that allow taping their live shows, and then encourage fans to trade those recordings. This includes bands like:

• Phish
• Grateful Dead
• Tenacious D
• Oysterhead

and so on. There are several communities that can help you get lossless versions of shows from these bands and others:

• www.etree.org
• www.furthurnet.com

-Mike

Projekt Records

[cjpez]

Projekt Records' frontman Sam Rosenthal has been quite supportive of P2P music trading, saying that it's an excellent way for the "smaller" labels like his to get more of a widespread audience. You can find a lot of Projekt bands on mp3.com, etc, too. If you sign up for the weekly email list thing, he'll rant about it occasionally. He was quite pissed off when Napster got shut down.

Bowie

[pete-classic]

David Bowie is the most enlightened artist that I know of as far as this goes. I don't care for his music, but he seems to "get it."

OTOH, his site is flash only :-(

Now, flame on about how he is already rich, blah, blah.

-Peter