The Empiricist

for the sake of your kids.
Would more TV make your life better?

Sad news.
.
For some entertainment, here she is singing Not Fair, her best song in my opinion. It seems that’s how she feels about music piracy, which is a motivation for her quitting and going into acting.

At the end of this month this blog will go on extended haitus. I’ll put up a placeholder page or something to entertain passersby.

UK singer Lily Allen has hit out (also reported here) at rich old musicians like Nick Mason of Pink Floyd and Ed O’Brien from Radiohead, who support file sharing and free exchange of music tracks.

The Featured Artist Coalition also says file sharing’s fine because it “means a new generation of fans for us”. This is great if you’re a big artist at the back end of your career with loads of albums to flog to a new audience, but emerging artists don’t have this luxury.

She’s completely right. File sharing erodes the market for music, by making it impossible to charge for your products and services – even if you stipulate that you don’t want to give it away for free. It’s one thing for some retired boomer multi-millionaire who’s already become rich and famous through the system to say they don’t care if people copy their music. But what about a musician who does care? Don’t they have the right to make money from their art, or do we now have to live in an artistic socialist utopia where people do things just out of the intrinsic joy of giving to the universe?
Art is at leat partly an entrepreneurial activity, and if people want to make money from making songs, then they should have that opportunity.
Allen in a follow-up post:

Please, please, please go and see a film in the cinema instead of buying it in Tesco’s car-park , buy a c.d. or album off itunes if you really like it, and god help us, keep buying books . If we do this, i really think we can make a difference.

In other words, consume! Consume to make the world a better place.
I happen to agree.
A hot woman advocating capitalism? I think I’m in love!
In a totally platonic sense of course. Married, middle aged men like me don’t have fantasies about young female rock stars. That would be wrong.

Anyway, here’s Lily Allen “The Fear” on youtube.

*sigh*

Terminating unwanted babies raises risks for later pregnancies. When you do actually try to go “all the way”, future babies will be more likely have low birth weight and be born prematurely, which of course lowers their chance of survival.
That doesn’t mean it’s wrong… just that it has health consequences. It’s good to be informed about these things.