File sharers are big spenders too!

Huh! Interesting! BBC News today reveals research by Demos that people who download music illegally also spend almost twice (£77 per month) compared with £44 per mth spent averagely by those who don't download - the Govt give a mealy mouthed response and manage to face both ways in typical political double speak - but critically they pronounce that "The scale of unlawful file-sharing poses a real threat to the long-term sustainability of our creative industries". This is simply not true. What it does do is reinforce the need for the creative industries (well, the big music producer boys, at any rate!) to get more creative, more imaginative about their business models. File sharing, downloading, is here to stay. When Mandelson (rather uncharacteristically I thought - he's usually more in touch than this - must be the company he's keeping!) threatened his draconian response to free downloading, most of the young people I know and work with just laughed - and continued downloading. And the interesting thing about that is that most of those young people are musicians and music makers...........

Govt has got to realise that they cannot put the lid back on this particular box. But they will insist on
listening to the wrong people - from Govt's own statistics, the creative industries is characterised by 94% of companies who employ less than 10 people - in fact the vast majority employ between 1 and 5 people. These are small businesses - and Govt has no mechanisms for hearing the voice of small creative businesses!

So instead they listen to the voice of the 6% minority who qualify as large companies, and who, turn out to be the very people who have grown large and rich by exploiting (through publishing and distributing etc) the creativity and IP of the small businesses - so the major music businesses, for example, whose market is rapidly disappearing as independent musicians learn how to publish and distribute their work themselves over the internet, now go wailing to government about how the creative industries are in danger from this unregulated behaviour and, idiotically, Government listen!! Instead of celebrating this new world where potentially artists take more control of their work, their market and their earnings!

What do we have to do to get Govt to realise that the world has changed? We now have an economy that is knowledge based, where the ecology is moving away from large monolithic companies to the vibrancy and fast moving culture of small and micro businesses for whom rules of practice are changing every day - all the old criteria that Government still use to identify '"success" are largely irrelevant - if a creative company doesn't "last for more than three years", that doesn't necessarily mean failure; it just means that they have chosen to move on to something else; if they don't "employ more than 5 people" , that doesn't mean that they don't know how to grow; it means that they choose to stay small - often so that their capacity for collaboration across a range of activities remains an essential part of their business practice! We don't have to behave - and indeed we don't behave - the way the companies behaved in the old manufacturing economy days - with huge investments in capital and labour that made fast moving agendas impossible to handle. We are fleet of foot, we change our perspectives and our business practice as we go, we are global in outlook and practice, we collaborate and then break up again, we offer no job security but we offer adventure, challenge, risk and reward - and we are much more fun - come on, Government, wake up and hear the music!