Features      November 28, 2000

Rock Stars Back Song Scribes to Fight Piracy
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By Mary Lyn Maiscott

It may seem ironic that the two highest-paid pop stars in England are supporting a fight for due payment of musicians and songwriters. The rocking Sirs--Paul McCartney and Elton John--rolled into the #1 and #2 spots on BusinessAge magazine's list of the 40 richest British music stars, with personal assets worth about $700 million and $200 million respectively. This week, along with his fellow Beatles, McCartney is enjoying the number-one record, appropriately entitled "1," in 19 countries, so maybe he's up to $701 million by now. And Elton John was recently in the news for revealing that he once spent more than $40 million in a 20-month period (explanation: "I like spending money").

Two mill per month. Whew! Still, this astonishing cash flow doesn't mean that Paul doesn't remember his Liverpool days or Elton his early Bluesology band gigs (hey, I looked it up). We all know that most musicians will never watch their bank accounts soar into the stratosphere, and perhaps this is something that fabulously wealthy people can grasp as well--or maybe they just want to make sure their great-great-great-great-great grandchildren are well taken care of. For whatever reason, the queen's knights are taking up their symbolic spears and jousting with those rapscallion outlaw Web sites that provide free music. New Media Music has already reported that McCartney has even invested in a company that encrypts digital music so that (ideally, anyway) it cannot be stolen (see "Tales from the Encryption").

This week, the two hitmakers are lending their names to a campaign called "Respect the Value of Music," sponsored by British Music Rights (BMR), an organization for songwriters, composers, and music publishers. Henri Yoxall, general manager of that group, says that "the campaign actually aims to highlight the interests of less well known writers-the writers behind the big names." These include supporters Pam Sheyne, who wrote the Christina Aguilera hit "Genie in a Bottle," and Nick Ryan, a composer who wrote the soundtrack for Sony's PlayStation 2 (which is not exactly a rock star but still the cause of near-riots in Paris the day it went on the market). In a press release, Sheyne writes, "Songwriters are the lifeblood of our industry and we need to educate the public, particularly the younger generation…that earning a royalty is what is keeping that songwriter alive, hence in the grand scheme of things keeping music alive."

News of Paul McCartney and Elton John's support of the campaign brought jeers on a couple of music newsgroups. (It's perhaps a sad truth that a movement primarily to help struggling workers requires the big names that are equated with big bucks for people to pay attention.) Aside from the issue of possible greed, many people think that Napster and similar sites encourage, rather than discourage, the buying of CDs. Even one of the BMR campaign's supporters, singer-songwriter Toby Slater, writes in favor of Napster: "I feel that the advantages offered by file-sharing technologies such as Napster vastly outweigh any believed negative consequences." He goes on to "urge all sides of the debate to cooperate in realizing this solution with some haste: so that music lovers may harness the power of the Internet while still rewarding artists."

If the BMR campaign can help to do this, more power to it. I'm sure Paul and Elton, looking out from behind that not-necessarily-blinding wall of money, would agree.