Featured Artist Coalition (F.A.C.) is a group of artists dedicated to reforming the music industry in the age of downloads. They support artists and fans over executives, trying to create a fair balance where the artist both makes money and keeps creative control. However, they recently supported the Lily Allen backed three-strike law, giving illegal downloaders/file sharers three warnings ’till their Internet is disabled/crippled. I can’t express how disappointed I am that F.A.C. supported this bill, as they were a group I supported & respected.

This bill is incredibly under thought, it punishes people for giving an artist free advertising. This is a bill for the music company executives; it helps them and hinders the artist and the fan. Secondly, file sharing is not only free advertising for an artist, it also allows a fan to discover more and more music meaning there is a higher chance they will like a band and go to see them live, which will in turn create money for venues allowing them to take risks on lower acts giving more advertising for up and coming groups. File sharing also allows an artist to be able to avoid signing a deal with a record company because they have their own free place of advertising with a large audience, making the record company’s more desperate and allowing room for them to bend to the artist wishes.

This does not create an alternative to i-Tunes, this does not give artists more rights, and this does not allow more and more music to be heard. What this allows is an increase of profit to the Record Company Executives, the continuation of exploit toward an artist, and a rise of cost of music making it more expensive to a fan, and in these rough financial times, that means less and less artists will have their music heard, which will in turn not help local venues.

To the members of F.A.C., this whole bill is exactly what you are against; if any of you are reading this please consider retracting your support of this bill.