Pete Townshend slams iTunes & the downloading culture

Tue, 01 Nov 2011

Pete Townshend has accused Apple of 'bleeding musicians' and says it's about time the online media powerhouse started 'given back instead of simply just taking revenue from out of the music business', reports BBC News

The Who guitarist was speaking at BBC6 Music's John Peel Lecture last night at Salford University (Oct.31) where he discussed the current state of the music industry.

From the offset Townshend laid into the downloading trend and iTunes in particular, which is now responsible for more than three quarters of all digital music sales, and argued that unauthorised file sharing was 'destroying copyright as we know it.'

"The word 'sharing' surely means giving away something you have earned, or made, or paid for?" said the mod-legend:

"Is there really any good reason why, just because iTunes exists in the wild west internet land of Facebook and Twitter, it can't provide some aspect of these services to the artists whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire, like a digital Northern Rock, for its enormous commission."

And he added: "A creative person would prefer their music to be stolen and enjoyed than ignored. This is the dilemma for every creative soul: he or she would prefer to starve and be heard than to eat well and be ignored."

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