According to The Guardian today “The Guardian is offering 10 free tickets on a first come, first served basis to “The MusicAlly debate: PR and P2P – the perfect anti-piracy pitch” on Monday September 13, 2004 from 6.00pm at the Guardian Newsroom, London, EC1. Sponsored by the Guardian, Guardian Unlimited and the Observer, the panel discussion will hear three top advertising, PR and marketing executives – Tim Duffy, the head of M&C Saatchi, Interbrand boss Jez Frampton and PR man and MediaGuardian.co.uk columnist Mark Borkowski – present their views on how the UK music business can avoid a public relations disaster as it seeks to confront the challenge of unlicensed file sharing.

“As British labels gear up to consider suing their own customers, how can the industry succeed in winning over the hearts and minds of today’s technology-savvy music fans and get across its point in a fresh, innovative and credible way?”

Too late folks. We’ve had the attempts at copy protecting CDs – many of which can be easily worked around, and which most people deplore. Now we have lots of legal music download sites (and quite a few more illegal sites). So what’s file sharing used for now? Sure, people still use it for music to some extent, but the main area that people use it for are software, movie and television releases.

And since when has the music industry been innovative or credible? Surely it’s not going to start now?