Tuesday, August 31, 2010

John Butler on political music and file sharing

I have just read an excellent interview with John Butler of the John Butler Trio - a band I have written about here before that has a number of political songs. The full interview from The Vine is available here and worth reading.

On political music:
There’s not many songs that you hear on the TV talking about things, talking about resource companies sucking the fuckin’ very spirit out of our country. There are no songs on radio that are talking about that, mainstream radio, let alone on a mainstream television show. To me, I'm behind enemy lines at the moment, man. [laughs] And I'm planting fucking bombs; I'm planting seeds probably more than bombs. That's how I look at it....

On file sharing:
My view is there are always going to be those who copy music and want to share it with friends. And that's fine with me. Hopefully if you like the music then you go and buy it. But I'm an independent company so 60% of my sale have gone down. As my music has gotten more popular, I've sold less albums. And I can understand why it's happening because the record companies to a certain degree kind of put out so much crap for so long that they lost their audience. Their audience didn't respect them, but at the same time, [laughs] losing 60% of your income makes it really hard to get out there and tour and to make albums!

Further Reading
The Vine, John Butler Interview (August 2010) < http://www.thevine.com.au/music/interviews/john-butler-_-interview20100831.aspx > 31 August 2010

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