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U2

(Credit: U2.com)

Looks like it's U2's turn to take a pounding from the bloggerati.

A speech on Monday by Paul McGuinness, manager of the band U2, was a call to arms against piracy. He wants to fight file sharing by forcing Internet service providers to ban people who pirate music. He suggested that Apple and other makers of digital music players were wrongly profiting from their "burglary kits."

McGuinness told a gathering of music insiders at the Midem music conference in Cannes, France, that music is making lots of people lots of money. Unfortunately, that money isn't finding its way to artists. He placed much of the blame on tech companies, but also pointed a finger at record labels that "through lack of foresight and planning allowed a range of industries to arise that let people steal music."

Not surprisingly, U2, one of the world's most beloved bands for more than two decades, is under attack in the blogosphere.

"U2's manager tells us why we are bad," "U2's crazy manager wants to go after tech firms," and "U2 McGu's ISP rant" are just a few of the headlines coming from outraged bloggers.

The band has not commented one way or the other on McGuinness' speech, but one would have to think they were apprised before he said it. A copy of the speech is posted on U2's Web site. Either way, like Prince, Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and (the granddaddy of all musicians who spoke out against file sharing) Metallica's Lars Ulrich before them, Bono & Co. are getting worked over.

Here's some of the wittier and more brutal comments...

"McGuiness is whining about this at the same time that U2 is pulling in incredible profits, making $355 million on its last tour," wrote Mike Masnick at the blog Techdirt.

Wired.com's Ryan Singel offered this: "Threat Level agrees that ISPs shouldn't get away consequence-free for transporting evil bits. But we counter-propose that ISPs use any nascent filtering technology they have developed to blackhole U2 and its frontman who goes by the ludicrous moniker Bono."

Privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein takes the manager to task for his comment about the tech sector's "hippy values."

"Paul has homed in on well-known hippie freaks like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates," Weinstein quipped. "You do remember when Steve and Bill used to hang out with Timothy Leary, right? No? You don't recall Switch On, Log In, and Buzz?"

The struggle for economic control of music is looking more and more like war between corporations and consumers. On one side, the record industry has an army of lawyers ready to sue. On the other, consumers have an army of bloggers ready to ridicule.

Choose the wrong side, and prepare to take a public whipping. At this point, no musician who takes up the pro-copyright banner should be shocked when he or she is branded a traitor and longtime fans swear they'll never buy their music again.

But if file-sharing really is hitting these musicians in their wallets, maybe they don't care.

In a speech at the Midem music trade show, U2 manager Paul McGuinness claims that Internet service providers bear a portion of responsibility for the sales decline in recorded music. It's so laughable on so many levels that I can't let it pass without comment:

1. File trading's not the sole cause of lower sales. McGuinness, like the RIAA and IFPI and other recording industry bodies, assumes that piracy on P2P networks is the main driver of the decline in music sales. This ignores several studies that have shown that heavy P2P users are also the heaviest music buyers (although those studies themselves are controversial). More to the point, this argument ignores other ways users are getting music for free. I'd guess that friends ripping CDs and swapping music on flash drives account for a fairly large proportion of purchase-replacements--I'm not going to buy a whole record for a song that I heard once on the radio if my friend's already got it and I can just rip it from him. And that's the other big problem: radio. It used to play new music and break new acts. But consolidation has led to exceptionally narrow, lowest-common-denominator playlists, and radio's become irrelevant to hard-core music fans, who drive popularity of new acts.

2. Net neutrality and safe harbor. As Mathew Ingram of The Globe and Mail argued very eloquently, it's absurd and unreasonable to expect ISPs to monitor all traffic traveling their networks for pirated content. Safe-harbor laws ensure that an ISP's not held responsible every time somebody uses their pipe for something illegal--imagine if victims of traffic accidents caused by drunk drivers could sue the state for building roads, or if victims of telephone scams could sue the phone companies. And monitoring is uncomfortably close to giving preferential treatment to content providers in exchange for an extra fee.

An aside: he shows his misunderstanding of the entire situation when he says: "There are many other examples that prove the ability of ISPs to switch off selectively activity they have a problem with: Google excluded BMW from their search engine when BMW started to play games." How is Google an ISP?

3. Broadband demand isn't driven by P2P. McGuinness' assumption that the main driver of ISP fees is P2P music shows the music industry's myopia. As he puts it, "Kids don't pay $25 a month for broadband just to share their photos, do their homework, and e-mail their pals." True, kids don't. Their parents pay the bill--and have been paying since long before P2P music networks became mainstream. People do a lot of things on the Intertubes--read, shop (eBay? Amazon?), blog, send IMs--and all of those things are much faster and more convenient with a broadband account.

4. The hippies cashed out long ago. The funniest and weirdest part of the speech is when he blames counterculture values coming from the West Coast of America for the tacit assumption that music should be free. He may be right that a lot of early techies came out of that community--Steve Jobs attended Reed College, and we all know that Stewart Brand deserves some credit for early online community The WELL--but Silicon Valley's been driven by the profit motive almost since its inception. And it's not like the Grateful Dead was ever a charity organization.

The thing is, I actually agree with his overall thesis: the best future business model for the recorded music industry I can think of is adding a few bucks to ISP fees, watermarking content, then splitting that revenue among rights holders based on how often a particular piece of content is played. The problem is that mandatory fees are unfair to those who couldn't care less about music and might not be legal, while voluntary fees work only if you have some sort of policing mechanism. But these interesting ideas deserve a spokesperson who's a little more familiar with the underlying technology.

(One last dose of vinegar: I can't dispute that U2 has had a lucrative career as a live band, but I saw them on the Zoo Station tour in 1992 and say with confidence that their live show is the weakest part of their act. Great props, great singer, but little variation. Even the ancient Stones swap songs frequently and occasionally stretch out a jam. Flame away.)

PARK CITY, Utah--Last night I saw U2 live in concert here at the local high school performing arts center...at least it felt that way.

Bono and I even had a moment--during "Sunday Bloody Sunday" he reached out his hand and almost touched me. He had to be singing to me, and not Robert Redford, Google's founders, or the rest of the Hollywood glitterati in my company. Right?

It wasn't actually a concert. Rather, I was attending a screening for the concert film U2 3D at the Sundance Film Festival. But same diff. It really felt like I was on the concert floor. Better yet, at times I felt like I was one of those waify teenage girls at concerts who gets hoisted onto someone's shoulders for a bird's-eye view.

That's me, getting used to my cool glasses before the screening gets under way.

(Credit: Michelle McPherson, festival-goer from Rippen, Calif.)

I don't use this term lightly, but I really felt like I was witnessing something "revolutionary" in filmmaking. The 90-minute compilation of footage from the band's Vertigo tour in South America was shot using a new generation of 3D technology provided by Burbank, Calif.-based 3ality, which co-director Catherine Owens said was initially conceived for sports footage. For the Sundance screening, it was projected in Dolby 3D Digital Cinema. (More to come on 3D tech following a related panel discussion later Sunday.)

What blew me away was the seamlessness and subtlety of the 3D tech, combined with the surround sound. You quickly forgot you were wearing those goofy glasses (in my case, over my own specs). It was hard to tell whether the applause and singing was coming from the film itself, or the Sundance audience members. When Bono asked the crowd to show him the light of their digital devices, the glow of cell phones from the festival audience blended right in with those of the concert audience.

Bono speaks to a star-studded crowd just before the screening of U2 3D at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday night.

(Credit: Michelle Meyers/CNET News.com)

Never, in my five years of covering the festival, have I seen such a hot and hyped ticket. Only two screenings of the film were scheduled, both of them taking place Saturday night. One was at 9:45 p.m. and the other at midnight.

One of the first festival-goers to arrive on the scene in hopes of getting a wait list ticket to the first showing was Nick Buckmaster, a huge U2 fan from Sausalito, Calif., who had been waiting since 10 a.m. He made the trek to the festival to see U2 (he's seen them perform 60 times) and also because he heard such amazing reviews of the film, which screened at the Cannes Film Festival among other places.

Despite their early arrival, festival staff members didn't let Buckmaster and his fellow fans start lining up officially until 7:45 p.m. And first dibs for wait list tickets went to those who had been waiting in line unsuccessfully to see the prior star-studded Robert DeNiro film, What Just Happened. Buckmaster did get into the show, which he said "was really far better than I expected."

He had worrried a little that the 3D would be gimmicky, as it was, in his opinion in some 1980s-era 3D films like Jaws. "This was more an enhancement of the experience," he said, adding that he was also happy it featured all the band members, not just Bono.

Ticket scalping at Sundance is very uncool; however, rumor has it that tickets to last night's show were going for up to $1,000. Kind of crazy for a film that opens in wide release next week both in IMAX and digital cinema.

A still from the film, U2 3D

(Credit: U2 3D)

The band's presence, however, did make the screening extra special. Bono opened the show by touting the importance of Sundance and the special mood that exists despite the "celebrity clusterf***."

"There is a lot of love and Irish whiskey in the air," he told the crowd, adding that if Sundance were in Dublin, it would be called "Raindance."

Of course, he had to sneak in his comments in between yells of "I love you, Bono." (I promise, it wasn't me.)

Owens, in her closing after the Q &: A, emphasized that the fact that she was able to put together U2 3D with no filmmaking background says much about the technology and its power as a new medium.