Bill Bennett Technology Today

I think that it would be a misconception on anyone’s part to think that they’re not just American teenagers as well. They have the same savvy technology as kids in big cities do. So yeah, when we watch the flow of file sharing, illegal and legal, I think the legals may be three of four percent of all the hundreds of thousands every day, and we do watch the flow back and forth to see if a TV show worked, if a song played at a concert worked, you know. We do watch peer-to-peer a lot. Certainly our music is being stolen. That is by far the biggest downside to it. I can’t fret over it because I can’t stop it so I have to leave that to people who deal with those things but what I can do it watch it, and learn from it and try to get information out of it and treat it as data. In a town that is a songwriters’ town, the loss of intellectual property is a huge deal. So there’s a fairly sophisticated political apparatus here, and there’s huge lobbying efforts in Washington on behalf of songwriters and producers out of Nashville. They’re very good at what they do and it’s certainly something we’re all trying to stop.

A few years ago my daughter came to me, I was working with this band, Secret Machines, and she said, “Dad, you’re not going to believe, there’s like a bunch of people on MySpace talking about Secret Machines.” So I’m like, that’s great. I go to Burbank and said to our IT guy, “is that us?” and he goes, “I’m not saying I’m not….” Two weeks later there it was in The Wall Street Journal. MySpace is an obvious place, any community where there’s that much blogging or that much confessing going on, you know, if going to attract people who are going to take advantage of the marketing. MySpace now is almost a marketing tool since it’s been bought.