Ed O'Brien on BBC

Ed O'Brien sits beside Speech Debelle, the new Mercury prize winner, on a BBC morning programme as Lily Allen launches her campaign against music piracy. He is not in favour of file sharing, he says, but as kids they swapped C90 tapes of the top 40, and “it was all quite innocent, it was in the spirit of discovering new music”. His problem is with persistent abuse and the websites that make money from it, and he would give the passive sharer some leeway, since the evidence suggests they go on to spend a lot on music. Letting fans pay what they liked for In Rainbows was simply Radiohead accepting that sharing had become the norm.

Artists agree with the industry on 99.9 per cent of it, he reckons. Where they split is on what to do with a persistent sharer. Suspending their internet accounts would take tracking software that costs a lot and raises civil liberties questions, and it would drive people underground into darknets. He credits Allen with putting the subject on the agenda, and says young artists like Debelle have more at stake than “old farts like myself”.