• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, December 6, 2004

The Recording Artists Coalition, which represents musicians signed by major studio labels, sharply condemned a report released Sunday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which claimed that about half of all musicians think that burning a copy of a CD or a movie for a friend should be legal, while one out of three think that file-sharing should be lawful.

Jay Rosenthal--lawyer for the coalition, whose members include Sting, Don Henley, and Christina Aguilera--condemned the study's methodology, saying respondents were biased. "It's like going to Fallujah and asking how they feel about Americans," he said of the study. "Certainly our membership doesn't feel that way."

For the study, Pew surveyed 2,793 musicians online between March and April of this year. Pew sought musicians for the study through organizations including The Future of Music Coalition, Just Plain Folks, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, CD Baby, Nashville Songwriters Association, Garageband.com, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers and American Federation of Musicians. The vast majority of musicians who responded had day jobs; only 8 percent said they supported themselves entirely through music.

Pew researcher Mary Madden, who authored the study, acknowledged that the musicians' group was not randomly selected. But, she said, the results were very similar to a Pew telephone study of 2,013 members of the general public and 809 artists, conducted in November and December of 2003.

The results of all three surveys were analyzed in the Pew report, "Artists, Musicians and the Internet," issued Sunday. The report revealed that musicians, artists, and the public at large did not view file sharing or burning CDs as negatively as the major record studios, which have brought high-profile lawsuits against alleged file-sharers.

"Artists--and musicians, specifically--are much more divided than one might think from listening to some in Washington," said Madden.

When asked whether burning a copy of a music or movie CD for a friend should be legal, 47% of online musicians said yes, as did 46% of artists and 43% of the general public. As to whether file-sharing should be legal, 33% of musicians said yes, while 37% of artists answered in the affirmative.

Opinion was similar about downloading from a file-sharing network such as Kazaa or Morpheus: 33% of musicians said this should be lawful; 35% of artists said this should be lawful; and 33% of the general public said so.

Rosenthal said that even the professionals in the Recording Association Coalition distinguished between burning a CD for friend and using a file-sharing network, mainly because making a copy for a friend is vastly more limited than posting music on a peer-to-peer network.