Why I Agree With Bono
When I logged onto Twitter yesterday, I discovered U2's Bono going down in Tweeted flames. Turns out the singer/philanthropist wrote a forward-looking Top-10 list for The New York Times in which he states, “A decade's worth of music file-sharing and swiping …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days after Bono called for tougher controls over Internet downloads in remarks carried by Agence France Presse, he doubled down in a forward-looking Top-10 list for The New York Times, blaming "a decade's worth of music file-sharing and swiping" — and got torched on Twitter for it. Reverb's column is a contrarian take: the writer agrees with him.
The piece matters because it splits the usual coalition. U2 is no stranger to giving music away through new platforms — the band previewed an unreleased track on Facebook back in 2007 — so the frontman arguing for tighter IP control while his own camp experiments with free distribution is exactly the tension his critics are pouncing on.
First-order effects
- Bono's op-ed turns his own Twitter following into the opposition, with the platform's reply culture amplifying mockery of the argument rather than the argument itself.
- Reverb's endorsement hands the anti-piracy case a sympathetic reading among music-tech readers who might otherwise file it as standard industry lobbying.
Second-order effects
- Other major artists now face pressure to declare a position on download controls, and U2's own history of free-platform giveaways shows how awkward that positioning gets for acts that straddle both worlds.
Third-order effects
- If artist-led advocacy like this reaches policymakers, enforcement pressure migrates from individual swappers toward the platforms and pipes carrying unauthorized copies — the broader fight over intellectual property spread online that Bono's Sunday remarks framed.
The trend: Established artists are using mass social platforms to argue for stricter copyright enforcement, even as those same platforms amplify the backlash against them.