
How Iron Maiden found its worst music pirates - then went and played for them - SuperChihuahua
http://www.citeworld.com/consumerization/22803/iron-maiden-musicmetric?page=0
======
mirkules
The gist of this article is that concerts bring in much, much more revenue for
the band than in-store cd sales via (a percentage of) ticket sales and
merchandising. Most of all, concerts expand the fan base leading to even more
revenue.

Most of us have been saying this for years (and some in defense of the Napster
model, for better or for worse), and it still seems like a no-brainer to me.
As one poster here pointed out, if artists treat the music experience as a
service instead of product (and, to expand on that, give the music away for
free), I would be interested to see the impact.

Also note that Iron Maiden has never had a song on the radio and they pride
themselves for it, so I don't necessarily buy the argument that artists need
the conventional music business model to succeed.

~~~
chc
And if you work at McDonalds 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you'll get
more revenue than you probably would as an entry-level developer in many
cities. The problem is that it is radically more work and doesn't scale well
at all.

(You might think this is an unfair comparison, but touring does pretty much
demand your whole life. Your effective wage from touring is typically not very
high when you consider how many hours it consumes.)

~~~
alttab
OK, so the entertainers of the future will work differently and make less due
to the digitization of music.

So instead of being famous and having millions of dollars and a huge tour
train, you'll produce music on the cheap or electronically and sell it via
you-tube, streaming deals, shows, and direct album sales for the super fans.

Innovation always has its side effects good and bad, but those who want to
entertain and be famous will still have all the motivation and incentive to be
creative and strive for the spotlight. They won't be making off too bad for
themselves, either.

~~~
wwweston
> So instead of being famous and having millions of dollars and a huge tour
> train, you'll produce music on the cheap or electronically and sell it via
> you-tube, streaming deals, shows, and direct album sales for the super fans.

This isn't a new model. Most artists _already_ rely on both performance and
recording revenues (some add licensing and/or merchandising). So we're
essentially talking about the old model, except with the apparent proposal
that we remove revenue from recordings.

That's removing a leg from a stool that's already frequently shaky to begin
with, except for mass-market pop acts that have already made it (Iron Maiden
is, more or less, one such act).

> Innovation always has its side effects good and bad

Can't make an omelete without breaking a few eggs, eh?

You can, of course, break eggs without making an omelete, and so far, it looks
to me like the instructions for the recipe under discussion stops at cracking
them open.

~~~
mcguire
" _Can 't make an omelete without breaking a few eggs, eh?_

" _You can, of course, break eggs without making an omelete, and so far, it
looks to me like the instructions for the recipe under discussion stops at
cracking them open._ "

Wrong question.

The correct question is, "How much are you willing do distort the rest of your
society in order to support one relatively minor, if wealthy, group of
people?" Or possibly, "How much damage do you want to do to other, more
important industries in order to protect a small one?"

~~~
wwweston
I've written elsewhere in this thread about how it seems some of the tech
community has been reacting so strongly for so long to the content cartels
insistence on copyright over everything that they often assume _any_ defense
of copyright/music sales is in service of a draconian tech-crippling regime.
Sometimes they even arrive at the complete opposite (and equally incorrect)
position that copyright and revenue from it is completely unimportant.

I can only assume that's what's going on here, given that nothing I've
proposed would reasonably prompt your questions.

I suppose I'll respond anyway, though:

> How much are you willing do distort the rest of your society in order to
> support one relatively minor, if wealthy, group of people?

Wealthy? I suppose there are some pop acts that make it so big that they
become pretty wealthy. These are indeed folks (like Iron Maiden) that could
continue to enjoy good business even without much recording revenue at all,
but they're no more a representative sample for the sake of discussion here
than most hackers are (or ever will be) Mark Zuckerberg wealthy.

As it happens, I am willing to distort society a _little_ , in much the same
way that the original copyright bargain does, for the same reasons. I think
that the norm should remain that recordings are something people should pay
for. That's it. No need for SOPA or DRM required everywhere by law or million
dollar fines for vigorously prosecuted individual violations. Piracy still
exists, and may even be often treated as discussed in the article, but people
who do it know it for what it is and that the approved (and supportive) way to
participate in getting recordings is to either purchase or download from where
they're explicitly free.

Probably wouldn't do terrible damage to other "more important" industries.

------
briancurtin
> Emphasis is now on touring and t-shirts as CD sales dwindle.

This has been probably every band's emphasis for years, and for non-mainstream
acts, it's not really an emphasis because it's the only way to make it in the
first place. Hardcore/punk bands live on t-shirt sales, and CD sales are often
break even if even that (I haven't stayed in touch with the friends who are
now selling vinyl). Any potential cut from the door (or from bar sales) pays
for gas. At the end of the tour, t-shirt profits either pay down your debt
from the last record, or go towards booking the next studio session.

~~~
Bahamut
That's because of the crooked contracts that the big 4 labels of the music
industry foists onto its artists, making CD sales not a viable profit-making
venture for the artists themselves.

The tours are the meat and potatoes of income for most artists because of
this, unless you go completely independent.

~~~
tptacek
The crooked contracts in which artists were advanced significant sums of money
that they needed to recoup from album sales, which they almost never actually
did recoup because the music business is like the venture capital business in
that a very few winners pay for a large collection of losers, and so as long
as artists were signed to a label and had their albums funded they could
afford a middle class lifestyle while producing music full time?

Those crooked contracts?

It is better, moneywise, to be a record label than it is to be a musician.
It's better to be a VC than an entrepreneur. But don't confuse that with the
fairness of the deal those people offer. It's better to be a financier than a
worker for reasons beyond contracts.

~~~
robin2
For a different take, read Steve Albini's "The Problem with Music"
([http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17](http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17))
in which he does a financial breakdown of what he considered a representative
scenario (back whenever it was written):

"The band [...] has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars
richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each
earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride
in a tour bus for a month."

Edit: In light of tptacek's third paragraph, perhaps it's more like a
variation on the same take.

~~~
tptacek
I yield to no HN'er in cultlike adoration of Steve Albini and read "The
Problem With Music" 20 years ago in a tfile collection that included his
European touring notes with Big Black and the bit about sleeping with PJ
Harvey. I'll add that Steve Albini is almost as big a message board dork as we
are; you can hunt down his comments on the Electric Audio forum (Electric
Audio being his Chicago studio), where Dave Grohl also apparently has
commented. It's sort of like an HN where Albini is the Paul Graham. Also, his
old food blog is pretty great.

Also, I like Big Black a lot, and even listen to Shellac every once in awhile,
and while he'd probably piss all over these selections as boring college rawk,
Surfer Rosa and Rid Of Me are two of my favorite albums, in large part because
of what he did to both those bands in recording them.

However: I think Albini is extremely biased in his take on the music industry.

First, he's a punk artist and a purist and not inclined to look favorably on
mainstream music of any sort (I especially highly recommend the longrunning
thread on his forum where his users tried to sell him on hip hop; it features
capsule reviews of something like 100 different famous hip hop tracks.
Spoiler: Albini wins, hip-hop loses.).

Second, he got screwed over by label management multiple times, most notably
during the production of In Utero, where he was scapegoated for Nirvana's own
artistic decisions and (unfounded, as it turns out) concerns that the band
couldn't possibly live up to the hype from Nevermind. He does. not. like. the
kinds of people who work for labels.

Third, he worked almost exclusively with the kinds of musicians who do not end
up making a living creating music. This was especially true when he wrote "The
Problem With Music". Albini's take on the music scene makes perfect sense if
you assume that, with the possible exception of a small collection of
engineers and other support professionals, nobody is going to make any money
producing music. Albini's favorite band, The Jesus Lizard, is/was headed up by
someone who had to leave music to become a lawyer.

But I look at things like the Mega scam, or, for that matter, Youtube and
Facebook, and see giant corporations who had _no hand whatsoever_ in creating
music of any sort, who couldn't give a rotten god damn about music, and who
nevertheless manage to extract tens of millions of dollars from the efforts of
people who dedicate big parts of their life creating it.

I find myself unwilling to accept the idea that "it's all the labels fault"
and "well people should just sell t-shirts" (and, as it turns out but isn't
popular to say, sleep in the back of a dirty van) as a defense for tech
companies trying to exploit music.

If you want to start a music startup on the Internet, do _at least_ what the
labels did: fund a couple acts and wait for one of them to break out and
become a huge success.

~~~
girvo
I didn't know Albini's favourite band was the Jesus Lizard. I like him even
more now. Great post btw

~~~
tptacek
He and David Yow are friends. I think Yow taught him to cook.

------
CWuestefeld
It's nice that a lot more people _like_ Iron Maiden. But the article doesn't
tell us what effect it had on the problem with in-store sales that it laid out
in the first paragraph.

I happen to think that in-store sales are a red herring, and overall sales are
more interesting, but that's not what the introduction laid out. But even
total sales aren't cited, just a number of social media friends.

I'm also not sure how much we can take from observation of mega-bands like
Maiden. I doubt that their experience will translate very well into the long
tail of musicians.

~~~
m3mnoch
while not "in-store sales", i think this helps: "The result was massive
sellouts. The São Paolo show alone grossed £1.58 million (US$2.58 million)
alone."

personally, i'm with you. in-store sales are a red herring.

for the entire history of music -- aside from the last 60 years or so --
musicians have been paid for performances or on commission. music, my friends,
is a service, not a product. and it has been for century upon century.

it's really this recent machination created by the recording industry that is
the anomaly. music piracy is really just the correction back to the mean.

~~~
stdbrouw
I agree with your conclusion but not your argument.

What does it matter if making a living as a musician through record sales is a
historical anomaly? And can you really call it an anomaly if previous
generations didn't have the option of selling records as the technology didn't
exist? That's like saying "cars are a historically anomalous mode of
transport". Great. So?

And by the way, in the early 20th century Broadway made a lot of money from
sheet music. A product.

~~~
pessimizer
It matters because the distribution situation has changed, so now you have to
actively and aggressively impede the distribution of all recorded sound in
order to preserve the business model.

It's like the government tearing out everybody's plumbing in order that the
outhouse builders can still make a living.

>And by the way, in the early 20th century Broadway made a lot of money from
sheet music.

By harassing and imprisoning people who would play music without buying it
first; a vile little historical chapter.

~~~
wwweston
> It matters because the distribution situation has changed, so now you have
> to actively and aggressively impede the distribution of all recorded sound
> in order to preserve the business model.

False dichotomy much?

------
bananacurve
This is an infomercial for a service that monitors piracy.

~~~
drivers99
Yeah. I'm not seeing the connection between the two. I coincidentally just
watched Flight 666 a few days ago for the first time, which is about a tour in
early 2008. It showed how they get a huge response from fans around the world,
but maybe especially South America. There was no indication that they went
there as a response to piracy rankings. The article itself doesn't even
support the headline.

~~~
m3mnoch
the relationship between the two is "true fans".

where are the true fans? they're where all the piracy is happening. what do
true fans pay for? live performances and a chance to connect with the artists.
hence, the epic money they're making in a place you wouldn't normally think of
as a money-generating location.

------
Dirlewanger
Crappy ad article. Plus, this doesn't even explicitly say if Iron Maiden hired
the firm and acted on the results. This could be a correlation for all we know
and again, just be a crappy ad article.

~~~
smcnally
The article explicitly says the firm arrived at its conclusions from Maiden
data it saw.

>Musicmetric noticed Iron Maiden's placement and ran its own analytics for the
band.

The firm wouldn't be the only one capable of drawing such conclusions.

I find the piece to be OK and interesting if not exhaustive and airtight.

------
ndesaulniers
Indeed, I came to love Iron Maiden via means of a typical [broke] teenager.
Once I had a revenue stream, I collected almost their entire discography on
vinyl and had the pleasure of seeing them live in concert twice, one Dream
Theater opened (dream concert). It was very exciting to see more and more
pedestrians in Iron Maiden T-Shirts as we drew nearer to concert.

I invite less familiar readers to watch their Flight 666 documentary on how
they've toured all across the world, including countries where the Catholic
Church has previously stepped in and banned them (over a song titled Number of
the Beast, which is in fact, about doing battle _against_ the devil). Anyways,
their music is a treat, and while Bruce can't belt out the same high notes he
used to be able to, the sheer musicianship of the band is incredible;
virtuosos the whole lot.

Up the irons, earth dogs!

------
suprjami
I hope Napster-hating Metallica read this and realise what an enormously
stupid mistake they made sending in the layers.

~~~
ballard
Metallicops video: [http://youtu.be/mb_jLAisPzk](http://youtu.be/mb_jLAisPzk)

------
vondur
Although not related, Iron Maiden was the first band I ever saw live back in
1984 on the World Slavery tour, Long Beach California. Good to see them taking
advantage of tech to decide where to tour. Going after music pirates is a
wasteful endeavor.

~~~
r00fus
Some degree of "pirates" are just underserved customers. This is a good
business move - especially if the brand is strong.

Iron Maiden is a great example, a "thinking man's" metal band that often
produced music inspired from famous books (Dune), movies (Where Eagles Dare)
poems (Rime of the Ancient Mariner), and tv shows (The Prisoner). Their mascot
is very distinguishable.

------
ryan-thompson
I couldn't get past the first paragraph. Unsubstantiated propaganda usually
doesn't come on this thick without a paid off politician spouting it.

~~~
kristopolous
it's just supposed to be a narrative setup for the content - trying to make
the story more substantial.

I agree that since the article was just about someone adapting to changing
markets, it was kind of an unneeded setup --- but just gloss over it - it's
like how in wired articles where they talk about the kind of coffee table and
rug the person has.

------
Kiro
> record stores are suffering from outright theft

Is this supposed to be irony?

~~~
37prime
It would be an irony if it said:

”record _companies_ are suffering from ouright theft"

------
malkia
I can't believe I'm reading about Iron Maiden here, since... it's my favourite
band ever!

------
windsurfer
Can anyone explain the phenomenon of in the middle of an article, a seemingly
irrelevant sentence appears: "Microsoft in 2013: Big changes, big surprises,
and a unifying vision". Why would they put this here? It's not relevant to
Iron Maiden at all.

~~~
Laremere
Seems to be an inter-site promotion link. If you follow it, it goes to an
article on microsoft, which has a link randomly in the middle linking to the
Iron Maiden article.

~~~
windsurfer
I didn't even notice it was a link. On the Microsoft page, they have the text
"See Also:" in front. How confusing! I guess I'm not their user.

------
belorn
> Unlike the shift to Amazon that did in the book store chains, record stores
> are suffering from outright theft, and the migration to iTunes or Spotify
> streaming isn't making up the difference. Between 2003 and 2009, about one-
> third of all independent record shops in the U.S. closed their doors

So are we talking about physical doors and physical shops selling CD's, or are
we talking about online shops, or are we talking about record labels? Each has
their own economic model.

A physical shops selling CD's is indeed having troubles, but its has
verifiable nothing to do with pirates. Second hand shops get constantly bins
of CD's, often reselling them for cents. They can barely give the CD away, and
selling it as the main source of income is not a hot venture. The few ones
that derive some income is those focusing on convenience, like convenience
stores, malls, and petrol stations. CD positioned in the same place in a store
as other impulse purchases, like candy.

Specialized online music shops has to compete with online shops that are more
broad in their service. Internet has yet to favor small shops over large brand
names. Almost all online shop for electronics also sell cd's, as its extremely
cheap to have a catalog over.

Last we got record labels. Like with movies and games, publishers tend to be
large and few between. There are not 10000 movie publishers in the UK (what I
know of). There are not 10000 game publishers. Why should there exist 10000
music publishers? Whats the business model that support such diverse number of
publishers?

~~~
res0nat0r
> A physical shops selling CD's is indeed having troubles, but its has
> verifiable nothing to do with pirates.

I'm sure many that still own independent record shops will disagree, including
my friend who happens to still work for once which is still surviving.

Americans didn't just somehow stop listening to music and buying it around the
same time that the mp3 came out in the 1990's because they became enlightened
and said "all of this music is crap, I'm not buying it anymore." No, most
physical sales have been replaced by piracy and also digital purchases thanks
to itunes, amazon mp3 after these stores were finally setup and gained
traction, but music sales are overall down and that in part is due to piracy.

~~~
belorn
If that is true, why can't second hand shop even give away CD's?

if its all about price, surely buy 10 for $1 is a should sell out in seconds?
Heck, I would not be suprised if some places refused music CD's to be gifted
to the store, just because its not worth the space.

CD and VHS is sharing the fate of obsolete physical medium. We did not stop
watching moves when VHS died, nor did we become enlightened and said "all this
films are crap". Nor did we say it when DVDs started to fall, nor should we
claim piracy when the doomed VHS store had to switch to DVD, which had to
switch to blueray, which had to become a streaming service.

> music sales are overall down

Fewer people buy a full track compilation CD to get a single good song. Rather
than spending $70, they spend $7 and get the song they want, or they spend a
monthly fee and get unlimited songs each month.

If the overall music sales are down, its because the market has changed. I
strongly doubt that the number of individual purchases has gone down at all,
and would speculate that it has gone way way up. Feel free to contradict with
number of songs sold and listened to by subscribing members, vs number of CD's
sold in the 1990s.

~~~
res0nat0r
Sure sales are down just like you mention. Piracy and the ability to spend $1
on the song you want vs. $10 to for the whole cd.

Also I seem to remember in the early 90s rummaging thru second hand $1 bins of
music. There is always excess crap or discs that are obscure and are hard to
move.

~~~
belorn
If you can show that the number of point of sales (and listening to a song in
the subscription model) are down compared to the 1990s, you might have a leg
to stand in your statement. Without it, all you have is statistics that say
that people paid more for less in the 1990s.

------
wwweston
> Unlike the shift to Amazon that did in the book store chains, record stores
> are suffering from outright theft, and the migration to iTunes or Spotify
> streaming isn't making up the difference.

This is now false, from what I've read. In the last year or so, recording
revenues started rising again. Which means either lots of people started
buying CDs again, or revenue gains from digital sales are greater than
decreasing sales of physical media.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/technology/music-
industry-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/technology/music-industry-
records-first-revenue-increase-since-1999.html)

A lot of people seem to have have looked at the steady decline in sales over
the last decade or so and have _assumed_ this means in a digital era,
recordings as products are over. The CiteWorld Iron Maiden article hints at it
(and the idea that all _your_ act needs to enter this new era is an analytics
package like MusicMetric analytics!). Some people are saying this in thread
outright.

That conclusion is more than a little premature when all we've got to look it
is a period which started out with adoption of digital music and the informal
sharing/pirate economy getting _way_ out in front of vendors... and then right
as they did get onboard and we started to climb past the early birds on the
adoption curve, we had the biggest economic crisis since the great depression
(which tends take a bite out of disposable income and entertainment spending).

(I think there might also be a reactionary phenomenon at work in the tech
community: because the content industry freaked out and insisted copyright
control and revenues were more important than anything including
software/internet freedoms and civil liberties, a lot of tech people seem to
decided to fight back by taking the contrary position that copyright
control/revenue isn't worth anything at all.)

~~~
astrobe_
The problem is actually two or three decades old: radio broadcasting and tape
recorders initiated it. After the failed attempts to copy-protect CDs, the
industry should have acknowledged that fighting piracy is essentially futile,
and should have prepared for a transition in their business model.

It's not like there were no warning, no signs. When Internet took of, the very
first great IP battle was against software piracy. Even an industry that has
the technical means to prevent piracy didn't really prevail, why would the
music industry win it? Studying the struggles of the software industry could
have learned them a lot on what was going to happen, and given them some leads
on how to evolve: hardware protection with dongles can be translated in
improved goodies and packaging; the shareware (ID Software, anyone?) model can
be translated in crowd-founded music like My major company. They could even
take a look at what the gaming industry is doing nowadays: subscription and
micro-transactions.

~~~
wwweston
Fighting piracy isn't what I'm talking about, though, and I think it boosts my
last point that you even brought the topic up. It would seem that significant
portion of the tech community can't seem to distinguish between the ideas that
(a) the norm for recorded music should be that we pay for owning a copy of the
recording and (b) we should take an aggressive approach to fighting piracy.

But let's talk about radio broadcasting and tape recorders, because that might
actually be an example of where we reached a reasonable equilibrium on this.
It was understood that people did use them to get copies of recordings they
didn't buy, but everybody learned to live with that, and the norm remained
that to legitimately obtain a recording, you bought it.

Software's like that too. Nobody's suggested the time for charging for
software of any kind is over, that the end of software development is a
service not a product. Some people choose to emphasize services (which is
fine), some people choose the product route. Some people do both.

Many who choose the product route do try for some defense against piracy --
it's the lock on the door of your house that you know can be broken with
enough effort, but is still a good idea. Everybody knows there's still some
piracy anyway, but the norm stays that software publishers can claim the right
to have their stuff purchased.

That's what I think we should be going towards for a healthy music industry.

------
37prime
FTA:

"After all, fans can't download a concert…”

What about live bootleg recordings?

But they cannot download the concert _experience_.

------
fleclerc
I agree it's pointless to fight piracy. I have a friend who took the same
approach that Maiden did: when his startup consisted of him and nobody else
(he was essentially developing a software at night watching hockey games), his
way to fight corruption was to upload his app to all the pirate sites he could
find. That helped him get his software into the corporate world (word of
mouth) and today he has almost 20 employees and his company recently bought an
awesome property near Montréal that was transformed into new offices.

While of course not accounting for 100% of his success, I think his strategy
was simply brilliant.

------
toolslive
So, the business model for music in the 2000s is the same as the business
model for music before 1900. You need to perform live.

Anyway, Iron Maiden is a very clever band. Never seen a band with more
merchandising. Also, they play games with their fans. This is a nice example:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reincarnation_of_Benjamin_B...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reincarnation_of_Benjamin_Breeg)

------
marquis
I watched an exclusive live broadcast with a world-famous artist recently in
his studio. It was free but I would happily have paid. I see a massive future
in virtual concerts, where by limiting access you give exclusivity, and with
twitter etc you have immediate access to your audience to feel connected. It
was quite special and I hope to see more of it - less touring but more income
for musicians is a good, good thing.

------
tudorconstantin
their number of fans increases due to torrents. it's like free publicity. it's
like pirating windows - they dont earn right away, but they have a huge mass
of people as educated and trained in day by day usage of their products. it is
just a shift in the ways to monetize the product

------
dragon1st
Never expect Iron Maiden article here in HN, this is absolutely ROCKS!!!

------
dylanhassinger
i'm living in Chile right now

SO MANY Iron Maiden shirts. its ridiculous

------
yetanotherphd
I know that hn likes to keep original titles but think a more accurate title
would be "how iron maiden found the people who buy their albums, and gave them
the finger."

------
kriro
Up the Irons

------
hyp0
piracy is radio

