Google ‘The Great Unwanted’ and you only have to get to the second page before you can download all 13 tracks of our debut album for free. (Don’t all rush at once!) My gut reaction, on first seeing our beloved little self-released record on these file-sharing sites was one of shock and disgust. How dare they? Don’t they know how God-damned hard we worked? It’s a reasonable reaction from a struggling musician, for which I don’t apologise. Then, I was working part-time in a book shop desperately trying to make ends meet. But the issue of illegal file-sharing goes much deeper than right and wrong, it reaches far wider than artist and consumer, and it represents an entire generation of kids who have been brought up on it. To them, music has always been free, so why should they start paying for it now? It seems the horse has already bolted and the industry only has itself to blame.

Much of last week’s controversy surrounding Lily Allen and The Featured Artists Coalition has focused on the notion of greed. Of course, we’re all Ferrari-owning multi-millionaire pop stars on a mission to squeeze the last few pennies out of the impoverished music fan. It strikes me that we have a PR problem here. As I took the good old Northern Line home from Air Studios on Thursday night, I felt obliged to write about this on my own blog because, whilst in the context of a meeting of fellow musicians my opinion is just as valid as Lily’s, it’s not as newsworthy. Believe me, we need these big names, but if the press only focus on them, the FAC is misrepresented. Nobody wants to hear a member of Pink Floyd moaning about his wages, in much the same way as nobody trusts a fat politician, and I can fully appreciate why some are peeved.

The thing is, Ed from Radiohead wasn’t sat on his private beach counting his gold, he was at that meeting talking to the likes of Andrew and I because it’s not about the money; it’s not about record sales or relative success from one musician to another; it’s about the principle of the thing.  In our case, we need all the money we can get in order to keep going. Each record we make pays for the next, and so we cling on to whatever income stream there is available. Why wouldn’t we? But there are some who believe musicians should simply give up their incomes from record sales as a matter of course. We already earn money from publishing, touring and selling T-shirts, so why be so greedy? Let’s make it all free. After all, it’s the record labels that will ultimately suffer because they take the greater cut (and who cares about hurting them anyway?) But in our case, we are the label, and just as not all recording artists drive Ferraris, not all record labels are evil, money-grabbing multi-national organisations. Labels struggle too.

The last thing we want to do is alienate the very people who enjoy our music. We rely so much on word of mouth because we don’t have major-label marketing budgets, and so we find ourselves in an incredibly difficult position. But others are profiting from illegal file-sharing – just look at the advertising revenue available on these sites.  I don’t know how many illegal downloads we’ve had compared to official record sales. I guess I’ll never know, but being part of the FAC at least means we are opening up the debate further and bringing our ideas to parliament and to the major labels, who are the ones really pulling the strings. And guess what? They’re listening. For this, I’m grateful to Lily Allen because without her, we probably wouldn’t be having this debate at all. And for an emotional Lily to turn up at our meeting having given us such a public battering was one of the bravest things I think I’ve ever witnessed. She threw herself to the lions, proving that whichever side of the fence you’re on – not that it’s ever that black and white – this debate is raging because it’s something we all care so passionately about, and that can only be a good thing.

Ali  x