A record label that exists primarily to oppose the major labels' litigious approach to tackling the P2P problem are claiming that a 12 year old singer/songwriter has been banned from featuring in an upcoming schools music programme because of her association with them.
The 'MyMusic' programme is being run as part of National Music Week, and new programme being staged by the BPI later this year to promote home grown music talent. The BPI are encouraging schools to run lessons on the consumption of music, and on all things copyright, as part of music classes during and around the National Music Week promotion. As part of that, participating students will be able to preview music from ten artists picked as fine examples of new British music. Each student will be able to download a track from one of the ten for free, and the Official Chart Company will track what gets downloaded and will release an overall chart based on how many downloads each artist gets.
Independent record company Flowerburger Records, who have signed 12 year old Amy Thomas, claim that the singer was up for consideration to be one of the ten featured artists, but that BPI bosses barred her from participation after realising she was associated with a label proactively opposing their anti-P2P strategy. With that in mind, Thomas recruited 50 friends via her Bebo page, and they amassed outside the BPI headquarters earlier this week, releasing balloons in protest to the BPI's alleged actions.
Although Flowerburger Record's statement said the BPI had declined to comment on the whole thing, a spokesman for the trade body told CMU that while Flowerburger did put Thomas forward for the MyMusic promotion, she was never in the running for the yet to be announced final shortlist. They also say they weren't aware of the protest until the subsequent press announcement.
BPI: "Apparently some kids released some balloons outside our office yesterday, but we weren't aware of this until we read today's press release. Certainly there was no attempt to 'storm the office' - it seems that they just took a photo and left. It's not true that we declined to comment, since we weren't asked. But for the record, we have finalised the acts for the National Music Week campaign and look forward to announcing them soon. This artist was one of many acts to apply, but they won't be taking part and were never in the running in the first place".