Posted: 15th Mar, 2010 By: MarkJ
Broadband provider TalkTalk UK and Dan Bull, the musician behind two comedy tongue-in-cheek Dear Lily and Dear Mandy videos, have teamed to do another music video that seeks to mock the music industry’s "
misguided" proposals to deter illegal file sharing.
Andrew Heaney, TalkTalk’s Director of Strategy and Regulation, said:
"If, like me, you remember the 80s, you may also recall recording the Top 40 on Sunday nights. Up and down the country, people were hovering over their cassette players with their fingers over the pause button, trying to get the perfect recording before Tony Blackburn spoke and ruined it. Back then the music industry told us that home taping would signal the end of the music industry and that it must be stamped out. There are clear parallels with today’s debate about filesharing and the Digital Economy Bill.
That’s why we teamed up with Dan Bull, the musician behind Dear Lily and Dear Mandy, to create our very own music video. ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’ is a tongue-in-cheek video that features 80s legends Madonna, George Michael and Adam Ant (well, actually it’s just a trio of look-alikes) lip-synching to the song Top of the Pops style.
We’ve consistently made it clear that we don’t encourage illegal filesharing. But in our view, the government’s filesharing proposals won’t change a thing – persistent filesharers will find another way of getting songs, movies and software illegally. It’s a never-ending game of cat and mouse."
The point TalkTalk attempts to make is that home taping didn't kill music in the 1980s, although the Compact Disc (CD) eventually replaced it a few years later. The ISP claims illegal filesharing won’t kill music either, which is at least partly borne out by its growth in digital content sales, and suggests that the creative industry adopt new business models instead of trying to clamp down on "
suspected" p2p abusers.