Cannes, France — Paul McGuinness has been managing U2 since they were performing for audiences of 20 people. Like the band, he is a visionary. U2 owns all of its masters and most of its copyrights (Peter Gabriel made a similar claim in a later discussion; artists out there, take note). He's not afraid of technology. After all, McGuinness sat down in Steve Jobs' kitchen and worked out the deal for the U2 iPod, and as a result we all heard commercials beginning with "Uno! Dos! Tres! Catorce!" for several months.

But McGuinness has seen a change in the industry. Before, bands had two professional avenues, recording and performing. He said in the early years U2's album sales covered its losses touring; the touring was promotional for the band and the album. But now the revenue stream for recordings is drying up. Why?

For McGuinness, it's clearly "hippies" in Silicon Valley, who love music but don't understand it. "They have a disregard for the real value of music," he says. They also, he feels erroneously, "don't think of themselves as makers of burglury kits."

All of those Silicon Valley geeks looking for the killer ap? "The real killer ap is our clients' recorded music," he told the audience of band managers, who burst into applause.

It's not just recorded music, McGuinness said. Piracy is drying up the mechanicals for songwriters.

ISPs have been in the cross-hairs of the European debate, and McGuinness wasn't about to leave them out. He had a number of possible solutions. One was filtering, which of course AT&T is considering in the US. (Disclosure note: AT&T is a member of the Copyright Alliance.) He also said tiered pricing can at least make heavey bandwidth users pay more, and then possibly some revenue sharing can come from that.

I"m not sure what the exact solution is, and I think everyone here would have to say that we likely won't get back to the world of U2 in the early 1980s. But he's right in that the artist remains central to the debate. They create, they inspire, they need to be the first constituency considered in any resolution going forward.

I saw U2 for the first time in 1983 or 1984. There were about 15,000 people in the ampitheater. We all walked out to our cars after the concert singing in unison, "How long… to sing this song… How long… to sing this song." I get goosebumps even now thinking about the connection those four young men from Ireland caused in an audience of strangers, some of whom had been jostling violently for position on the grass before the show. That was a power delivered via a live performance, but we were all able to sing along with the final song of the show because we had the album at home and had listened to it repeatedly there. With music, recorded performances and live performances are not mutually exclusive. 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 2:43 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under creators, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.