Townshend Talks Web 2.0

The old bones of The Who toddle into Vancouver this week for a concert at GM Place (I can ridicule: I saw them in the Coliseum in 1980--their very first concert after Moon's death.) What's not so pasty grey is Pete Townshend's opinions and involvement in the social networking aspects of the Web and how that's shaping his music:


"The Internet give musicians a false sense of control. I have sold music on my own website for six years. You are selling to a fan club, not to the public. There are some exceptions on the Internet, where artists have suddenly flared up across MySpace, YouTube and iTunes and got a hit, but it is rare. And that kind of hit makes very little money for the artist, only for the people running the sites and selling the ad server space. So much music is stolen, and the people responsible for this are the owners of MySpace, YouTube, and other user-group-oriented sites that are actually owned by large corporations who make their money from ad server hit rates that (with YouTube) can hit eight million a month.
"But YouTube is fun, and a place of discovery too, so it's hard to work out where the exploitation ends and the promotion begins. What I still love about the Internet is the way you can gather people together for special projects, and focus their interest (albeit briefly sometimes) on events and happenings. I published my novella The Boy Who Heard Music as a 25-week serial on a Blogspot weblog. This led directly to me completing the Who album with Wire & Glass, a mini-opera based on the novella.
"I developed the novella as I went along with feedback from about 800 readers who commented. It gave me a real feeling of being a part of a new creative community, and that my fans are often a lot smarter than I am. It was humbling and extremely valuable for me as a writer. I've since met quite a few of those people and I like and respect them. Usually when I saw their faces in the past they would be in the front row drinking beer and screaming like ice hockey fans.
{Vancouver Sun, October 7.06, F8}