Ed O'Brien warns the Featured Artists Coalition of a PR fight

Ed O'Brien expects the music business to turn on the Featured Artists Coalition, he wrote on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, on Sunday. The coalition held its first meeting on Wednesday 11 March at Heaven, the London club under Charing Cross station. there is going to be some seriously heavy PR aimed at us by the interested parties who might deem the FAC a threat .there's a lot of fear out there in the biz². He promises to write more about it.

He posted from Mexico City on the day of Radiohead's first show there since 1994, at the Foro Sol; the last time they came, he notes, the My Iron Lung EP had just come out. He has waited years, he says, for the dates in Brazil, Argentina and Chile that follow.

Ed is one of the coalition's directors, with Dave Rowntree of Blur, Kate Nash and Billy Bragg. Radiohead were among its founding signatories last October. The meeting was open to any featured artist, meaning anyone who has put a record out, and Robbie Williams and Mick Jones were in the room. Most of those there voted against prosecuting fans who download illegally, which Bragg called a road to criminalising the audience.

Artists and fans, Ed writes, have always been the two groups left out when rights and money are carved up. The coalition is above all about young bands getting a fair deal in the digital age, and with Barack Obama in the White House he calls this the moment for a noble organisation, old-fashioned word or not.

After the meeting he told The Guardian that young bands are the lifeblood of sites like YouTube and MySpace. YouTube has taken thousands of music videos down, Clash reported, since its royalty talks with the PRS broke down. You have our content, so don't you think some of those huge ad revenues, some of that money, could go back to the artists?³