Silicon Valley's Hippy Values 'Killing Music Industry'
· U2 manager urges artists to fight online piracy
· Plea to technology gurus to take responsibility
U2's manager yesterday called on artists to join him in forcing the "hippy" technology and internet executives he blames for the collapse of the music industry to help save it.
Paul McGuinness, who has plotted the rise of the Irish group over 30 years, said technology gurus in Silicon Valley such as Apple's Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates had profited from rampant online piracy without doing anything to stop it.
"I suggest we shift the focus of moral pressure away from the individual P2P [peer to peer] thief and on to the multibillion dollar industries that benefit from these tiny crimes," he said.
He was speaking at the Midem music conference in Cannes, which has been dominated by talk of new revenue models that might save an industry brought to its knees by piracy and falling sales.
Confusion yesterday surrounded the future of one of those new models, Qtrax, the supposedly legal filesharing service unveiled with the backing of artists including James Blunt on Sunday.
The service, five years in development, was due to launch yesterday and claimed to be able to offer more than 25m tracks legally using a new advertiser-funded model.
But while label insiders yesterday confirmed talks had taken place and were continuing, they were taken by surprise by the launch announcement. They said no contracts had been signed and earlier agreements had expired.
