Bono Upset About Piracy, But Doesn't Want To Protest Because He's Too Rich

from the interesting-reasoning dept

U2's manager, Paul McGuinness has made some news in the past few years for blaming absolutely everyone but the recording industry for the recording industry's problems. According to McGuinness, it's the fault of digital "hippies," cable operators, ISPs, device manufacturers, P2P software companies. Could it be the fault of an industry not adapting? Of course not. It's that everyone else needs to craft ways to help U2, a band that had just brought in $355 million in a single tour when McGuinness made those comments, more money.

It's that last point that apparently has Bono being a bit more cautious than his manager in lashing out. Bono has made some statements in support of his manager -- including a letter last year that seemed to blame tech companies. This, despite the fact that he's supposedly a venture capitalist, whose firm has invested in numerous tech companies, including Palm -- and U2 has done deals with Apple for special iPods and more recently, with RIM. I guess it must be other tech companies he's talking about.

However, in an interview with USA Today, Bono has expressed his distaste for file sharing, while admitting that he really can't lead the fight since he makes so much money already, recognizing how easy it would be to target him for appearing to be a hypocrite:

"It's not the place for rich rock stars to ask for more money, but somebody should fight for fellow artists, because this is madness. Music has become tap water, a utility, where for me it's a sacred thing, so I'm a little offended."

Of course, he might want to think about why that is. The fact that he's still able to bring in millions on tour, and has a huge multi-million dollar deal with Live Nation certainly suggests that perhaps file sharing isn't destroying the industry, as he suggests.

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Will U2 Manager's Next Rant Blame Bono For Leaked U2 Tracks?

from the blame-game-come-uppance dept

In the past year or so, U2's manager, Paul McGuinness has lashed out at pretty much everyone, other than those in the music industry, for the evils of file sharing. His main target was ISPs, but also device manufacturers, search engines, social networks and many, many others. It wasn't long after this that U2 lead singer Bono more or less agreed with his manager -- though using more diplomatic language. However, as a few folks are joyfully noting, it appears that the only one to blame for the leak of U2's most recent tracks may in fact be Bono himself. Apparently, someone was passing by Bono's beach villa in the south of France and heard the stereo playing incredibly loudly with new U2 tracks, so he recorded them and put them up on YouTube.

To be honest, this story has a lot of questionable elements to it, and little to back it up. So it could be entirely false. Even if it's true, it's difficult to see how the quality could be even halfway decent. Either way, though, it does show how silly it is to blame others. Instead, why not look to examples like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails who have shown that when you control the leak, it can work to your advantage in a rather massive way?

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Bono Agrees With Manager: ISPs Are To Blame For The Downfall Of Music

from the blame-the-enabler dept

About a month ago, we wrote about how Paul McGuinness, the manager of U2, was repeating an earlier rant blaming pretty much everyone but the recording industry for the recording industry's troubles. Basically, the rant could be summed up:

All of these other companies actually had the foresight to see where the market was heading with digital music, and they built up businesses that made money! The actual recording industry, however, did not foresee any of this, did not build up the business models -- and, in fact, stuck to the old, increasingly obsolete business model so stubbornly that it actually pissed off many fans. Therefore, it's clearly the fault of those who accurately prepared for the changing marketplace, and they should give lots of money to the companies that deliberately chose to ignore these trends.

Well, that may be a bit of a paraphrase, but I think it's pretty close.

Anyway, despite him ranting on in such a misguided fashion for quite some time, U2's Bono has been too busy saving the world to weigh in on the matter... until now. Valleywag points us to the news that Bono has written a letter to NME Magazine, where he, too, claims that it's all the fault of these damn ISPs and tech companies building real business models that make the market for music more efficient and open up all these new opportunities to profit. However, he does choose to contradict his manager on one point: arguing that McGuinness is wrong to claim that Radiohead's experiment with pay-what-you-want for music backfired and hurt the industry. Bono claims that the experiment was "courageous and imaginative." The same, however, cannot be said for all those tech companies that actually enabled that courageous and imaginative experiment to take place. They're obviously just exploiting the musicians.

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