NEIL LEYTON Creatively Thinking
Neil Leyton is a musician's musicians of the highest degree. The Canadian label owner, artist, producer has brought together an independent record label with a unique and very modern way of thinking. In an age where copyright laws are clamping down on music fans from finding new music through friends and on the internet, Leyton has put together the Share scheme which allows songs from his label to be downloaded, copied and 'shared' between music fans with no risk of breaking copyright. Leyton recently visited the UK on the Canadian Invasion Tour along withThe Pariahs and Aceface to promote the new UK branch of his Fading Ways label and spoke to TrashPit about what hopes he has for this exciting new project. What has been the initial reaction so far to the Fading Ways label and concept of thinking? Anybody with an open mind has been really receptive to the Share theme of things and Creative Commons. In terms of the 'so-called' music industry or what I call the entertainment industry, a lot of people are fairly closed minded about any changes to the status quo and very fearful of losing their cushy major label jobs because of the competition so it's definitely an uphill battle when you talk to those sorts of people. They're pretty fascist in terms of limiting use or what we used to consider fair use - like for example if you buy a record and you want to make a copy so you can play it in your car, so if your car gets broken into you wouldn't lose your record collection - that's been completely disallowed by all these new laws! It's really a nasty climate in North America right now. But even in some major labels I've had people who go "Wow, this is an amazing idea - all the best, I hope it does really well" I actually heard about Creative Commons through an article in either the New York Times or one of the more conservative publications out in New York, but it was sort of a legal review. Strangely in the pressing of my last album 'Midnight Sun' beneath the copyright notice I'd written 'You're free to copy this record if you love it as much as we do and want to share it with a friend' This was long before I'd heard of the Creative Commons license until I read this article about this not for profit agency operating out of Harvard Law School started by a law professor by the name of Lawrence Lessig who's a bit of a black sheep in American legal circles for obvious reasons. So I just jumped onto this because it fell squarely into the same sort of scenarios which I had tried to accomplish with 'Midnight Sun'.