“We must shame them into wanting to help us. Their snouts have been at our trough feeding free for too long,” he said during his January 28 keynote speech at France’s MIDEM conference.

“I’m here to ask some serious questions and to point the finger at the forces at work that are destroying the recorded music industry,” he explained before listing Microsoft, Google, AOL, Yahoo, Comcast, Vodafone, Facebook and Apple as being among the culprits.

He said that such companies could help if they wanted to. Their ability to block various kinds of activity, i.e. visits to controversial Web sites, showed that they also had the ability to target P2P offenders who use their services.

He blamed the record companies that allowed an entire collection of digital industries to arise that enabled the consumer to “steal with impunity recorded music that it had previously paid for.”

He said that’s what has caused “human fallout,” as the companies react to falling revenues by cutting staff and tightening belts.

“Many old friends and colleagues have been affected by this. They have families and it is terrible that a direct effect of piracy and thievery has been the destruction of so many careers,” he explained.

He set out to identify a course of action that will benefit all labels, writers and publishers, and help acts avoid joining that “long, humiliating list of miserable artists who made lousy deals, got exploited and ended up broke and with no control over how their life’s work was used, and no say in how their names and likenesses were bought and sold.”

He said there’s technology the global music industry could adopt that enables content owners to track every legitimate digital download transaction, wholesale and retail.

Another target for McGuinness was what he described as “the dreadful 360 degree model.” He quoted New York lawyer Allen Grubman, saying, “God forbid that one of these acts in a 360 deal has success. The next thing that will happen is the manager gets fired and the lawyer gets sued for malpractice.”

According to McGuinness, maybe it would help if the record companies were to offer to cancel those deals when they repair their main revenue model and the industry recovers.