McGuinn on the folk tradition vs. the record labels

For the past three months, I've been publishing a new excerpt or interview from "Darknet" here nearly every week. Here is this week's installment:

Roger McGuinn on the folk tradition vs. the record labels (on Ourmedia)

I spoke with McGuinn -- a renowned solo artist who was lead singer of the Byrds in the mid-'60s -- about McGuinn's Folk Den, a Web site devoted to continuing the folk tradition of storytelling, which he says is in danger of being obliterated by commercial interests.

What's your opinion about the whole file-sharing phenomenon?

As an artist, I think it's just like being played on the radio. It's good publicity. I went to the Senate and testified on that. The only money I ever got out of the record deal was the advance, which was pretty small when you boil it down, and the money I made secondarily, through playing concerts. The record labels have very creative accounting. At Aristra Records, I sold half a million copies of "Back to Rio" and never got a penny in royalties.

It sounds like sour grapes, but it's a fact of life. The labels say, well, we need to do that because not all the albums sell and we have to subsidize the others. But nobody has ever audited the record companies and come away empty-handed. ...

This guy Cory Doctorow [of the EFF], he points out that every time a new technology gets in the way of copyright, they try to break the technology. They have to drag the copyright people kicking and screaming to the money tree, because they always make more money. It happened with piano rolls, it happened with radio, it happened with VHS videotape. The studios make more money off video than they do in the theaters. With the Internet, they haven't figured it out yet, but they're going to make money there, too. The blanket license might be one approach.