Lily Allen and Radiohead Square Off Over File Sharing

While the debate of illegal downloading has gone from boil to simmer lately on our side of the Atlantic, the discussion hit a crescendo in Great Britain in the past week. The government there is currently proposing cutting off Internet connections for persistent illegal downloaders, and the Featured Artists Coalition, a group formed to develop policies and opportunities for musicians in the digital age, has come out against the measure. Ed O’Brien of Radiohead specifically referred to file-sharing as the modern equivalent to creating mixtapes for friends.

In response, Lily Allen started a new blog on Sunday, claiming that the prevalence of file-sharing is killing Britain’s music industry and that while it either has a positive or at very least benign effect on established acts, file-sharing denies emerging artists the opportunity to gain a commercial foothold.