You can not download a beer.

 

So picture this: you have the gumption and guts to leave a paid day job you didn’t have your heart in, but which kept you alive, to follow your life’s dream of making music.

You invest money you’ve hardly got in equipment of a high enough standard to record releasable tracks, you put yourself through the creative heaven and hell of making an EP, you pull in a favor to get some artwork done, you deliberate over the design and come up with copy you hope will entice people, you pull in more favors and spend some more hard-won money on a promotional video you hope will go viral, you spend time and money uploading your EP to iTunes and wherever, you spend more time and effort creating some kind of buzz through Facebook, Twitter and various blogs, all the while wondering if anyone will like what you’ve done – and during this longwinded, lonely process you’ve not been earning any money, and have been living on pure faith.

Then some fucker, fuelled by some sort of distorted impulse of faux-anarchic zeal steals the files off the internet and starts sharing them willy nilly, thus cutting the possibility of making any money to repay your investment and affording you a bit of a living, by approximately 90% – as if it wasn’t hard enough to do that in any case.

And I ask you, if you happen to be a faux anarchist such as this, deluding yourself in the misconceived notion you’re liberating these tunes from the grip of the evil capitalist machine for the greater good of humankind, to put yourself momentarily in the artist’s shoes.

And with such empathy as this elicits, ask yourself how it could be considered in any way just to assume that someone who devotes their life to contributing to the world by way of making it sound and feel more beautiful for everyone, should be expected to starve and suffer for their endeavors. Had you sacrificed similarly, how would you feel seeing your heartfelt gifts thieved and defiled like that?

Fortunately vast swathes of humankind have the natural decency to realise this and hence the sale of downloads have finally overtaken the sale of CDs – decency combined with the panoramic intelligence to understand that if all recorded music was thieved – and this applies to all forms of creative output: books, films and so on, not just music – all the artists would eventually die in penury and we’d be living in a very dull, artless world.

This is written as an exhortation to honesty and respect for the output of all the artists of this world, this brave, courageous group of souls who make our world the colourful, beautiful place we all still have the privilege to enjoy.

One of the greatest writers of our time is a good example, this is why he wrote this statement. By the way, Barefoot Doctor is conducting the biggest sound healing the world has so far ever seen or heard – 12,000 people chanting the sacred OM, accompanied by some of the best EDM acts in existence and some of the funkiest spoken word artists on the planet, at Wembley Arena, London on 12.12.12.

Come to THE BIG OM – jump here to watch the animation and get on the priority ticket list.