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Paul Hewson is an unremarkable-looking Irishman who, at 49 years of age, insists on being called Bono.  You may have heard of him.  He’s in a popular music band called You Too.  Their 16-date American tour last year raked in an average of $7.7million per show (massively questionable numbers pinched from here).  Their 2005 Vertigo tour grossed $389million, a figure that will probably be dwarfed by the current tour when it ends later this year.

A trusty old reliable Google search throws up various answers from £162m to £400m, in response to my typing the words how much is bono worth and hitting enter.  In short, Paul Hewson is not short of a few quid.  As well as making money from touring with his pop band, he also writes the odd New York Times newspaper column, which he probably doesn’t do for the love of it.

You may have read his recent article in which he bemoaned a decade of music file-sharing which has — and get this! — hurt the “creators” (songwriters), whilst benefiting “rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.”

Well excuse me Paul, but boo-fucking-hoo.  Your comments hold water, but coming from someone who could well be worth half a billion quid, it’s a little hard to take seriously.  We all know music piracy is theft and that theft is wrong, but to imply that internet service providers are stealing your hard-earned royalties sounds bitter and petty.  Especially when you consider that this £half-a-billion fortune is largely built from a completely mediocre back catalogue*.

I don’t hate You Too.  I don’t.  I’ve even got a couple of their albums.  I even like some of the songs.  But that said I can sum this all up no better than my mate Greeny does in his Modern Toss t-shirt.

And in the interests of fairness, I found some quotes made a few months ago on the subject of music piracy by David Ford (an artist who isn’t worth £500m) around the time Lily Allen made a spoilt tit of herself by ranting about the evils of music piracy in her blog, which, admittedly, I couldn’t be bothered to read but on which of course I’m still entitled to have an ill-informed opinion primarily based upon the fact that I can’t stand her. 

Ford’s Twitter comments ring as equally resonant now as they did when he tweeted them in September:

• why should it be that the ones who complain loudest about illegal downloads/file sharing etc have already made lots of money from music?
• part of the problem is that the lack of respect paid to the artist is mirrored by the artist’s lack of respect for their art.
• i think really, we all know when we are stealing and when we are sharing. obviously i would discourage stealing but to share is a good thing

 

And printed on his mini-EP CD Pages Torn From The Electrical Sketchbook Vol #1:

“never mind all that legal shit, if you like these songs, why not copy them for your friends”

 

That’s a bit more like it.

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* This is a deliberately inflammatory and largely unfounded remark intended only to rile Hywel Adams