

Unknown band's album illegally downloaded 100,000 times. Or is it? - mopoke
http://www.torrentfreak.com/cria-watches-massive-music-piracy-crisis-devastate-unknown-band-110404/

======
filiwickers
Here is a blog post from the band manager yesterday.
[http://www.camerontilburypublicity.com/post/2011/04/03/Illeg...](http://www.camerontilburypublicity.com/post/2011/04/03/Illegal-
Downloading-follow-up.aspx)

I think the band should be very frustrated. Their manager made a invalid claim
without real evidence then decided to take swift and public action.
Unfortunately, the manager does not understand the situation and refuses to
talk to anyone who may understand it.

What could the band have done here? Was the lack of sales that much more
important than the bands popularity?

------
kristofferR
I imagine this must be quite sad for the band. If they're creating music for
any other reason that just pure moneterily reasons, it must be quite weird to
first believe that you have tens of thousands of fans listening to your music
(albeit not paying for it) only to realize that almost nobody at all have even
heard of your band.

~~~
dexen
In any case, what matters most for a band is how many attend their public
performances. Both for the reasons of revenue (bands usually get reasonable
cut of concerts revenue) and for the reasons of publicity.

And self-esteem ;-)

------
olegious
The "manager" of the band is stuck in the old media model of the music
industry. I would be delighted if my album was downloaded 100K times- I'm sure
I would see corresponding increase in Twitter and Facebook followers, YouTube
subscribers and live show attendance, merchandise sales, etc. When are the
music industry people going to get that? I would think that this would be
common sense?!

~~~
jameskilton
When you get down to it, common sense ... isn't. And because of this amazing
lack of common sense, this band, or at least the name, is pretty much screwed,
good music or not.

------
rick888
This article talks about "sampling" music. Grooveshark and last.fm are for
sampling, downloading is for getting everything..IE: not sampling.

I've heard the argument that most bands don't make money on the albums, only
the merchandise and concerts. What's interesting is that piracy has made it
this way. When piracy wasn't as mainstream, the bands did make money on
albums.

Why can't people admit that they are too cheap to spend money on something
they know they can get for free with little effort and little consequences?
These arguments have been going on since the mid-to-late 90s and every few
years, when the record companies listen to the public and comply with the
pirates' demands, the excuses change (which is why you should never negotiate
with criminals).

First it was because you couldn't sample music and it was too expensive. The
industry listened and songs are now 99 cents (you aren't forced to buy an
album) and you can also preview songs (for free) on a multitude of services.

Then it was because artists were getting screwed by record contracts. Now, any
artist can sell his music online, without a contract. But the funny part about
that is that piracy has destroyed the market for them. Because piracy is
rampant, the value of music online has gone down considerably and people
aren't as willing to pay for music.

This is the real problem with piracy. It's not about stealing that one song,
it's about destroying an entire industry of digital products. The value is
only what people are willing to pay and as more and more people know they can
get something for free, the closer it is to $0.

But, it's the age of entitlement...

~~~
dexen
_> But the funny part about that is that piracy has destroyed the market for
them (...) and people aren't as willing to pay for music. _

That line of reasoning flies in the face of facts. You assert, ``one can't
compete with free'', but every day shows that's _not_ the case.

While the data itself is free, or very cheap indeed, the services (here:
public performances, endorsement of commercial products etc.) are paid for.
The brief period (less than a dozen decades) when the vinyl/tape/CD was the
only way are over. No longer media and distribution costs dwarf the music
costs.

Look at IT for a moment. For nearly every commercial IT product out there, you
see free alternatives. Yet the commercial stuff turns decent profit. Some
companies sell services for the free product and make a decent buck. And,
perhaps surprisingly, developers of free software also manage to get jobs and
gigs. Both ecosystems thrive. Musicians can -- and sometimes actually do --
follow that way too.

\--

As for the ``First it was because you couldn't sample music'' -- look,
capitalism 101. Distribution and demand only set the price at the value point
if there is information parity between the seller and buyer. Should there be
any information disparity, the price will diverge from the value. And given
the huge amount of advertising popular artists receive, there sure is a lot of
information disparity.

Now you were telling us the album prices weren't inflated? And don't even get
me started on product bundling -- where you'd have to buy an album with a
dozen songs to get one or two decent.

~~~
rick888
"While the data itself is free, or very cheap indeed"

The data isn't what you are paying for. You are paying for the years of
experience and creativity involved with creating the album. Also, this isn't
really for you to decide. The market decides this. It's been forced upon the
artists and the record labels by people illegally downloading and copying
music, but this isn't the market.

"Look at IT for a moment. For nearly every commercial IT product out there,
you see free alternatives."

We aren't talking about a band like Metallica coming out and competing with
Metallica with free music. We are talking about making copies of Metallica and
competing with the music that actually costs money.

"Yet the commercial stuff turns decent profit. Some companies sell services
for the free product and make a decent buck."

This is one of the only ways to make money with free software, aside from
donations and advertising. Good, free software has only been around for 10
years. Eventually, it will drive the cost of commercial software down to
nothing. This is why I stopped selling applications and moved everything to
services.

"And, perhaps surprisingly, developers of free software also manage to get
jobs and gigs. Both ecosystems thrive. Musicians can -- and sometimes actually
do -- follow that way too."

I'm glad you mentioned developers, because there is another consequence of
having so much free software. Because there is so much free software out
there, most businesses don't really need engineers anymore. The difficult
parts of the software are already out there, for free. They just need to hire
someone to make custom changes to it, which can usually be done with a much
less-experienced developer at a much cheaper rate.

Most business owners aren't tech-savvy enough to realize this right now, but
as the younger generation starts to own more businesses, it's only going to
get worse for developers. I've already started seeing this.

The hypocritical part about all of this is that if mass amounts of companies
started ignoring the GNU license and putting code in their proprietary apps,
many of the same pro-piracy people would be talking about "theft" and
"stealing code". I've seen this with pretty much every discussion about a
company violating the GNU on HN.

"Now you were telling us the album prices weren't inflated? And don't even get
me started on product bundling -- where you'd have to buy an album with a
dozen songs to get one or two decent."

No, I'm saying people used that as a reason why they were pirating and now
that you can get albums at a very cheap price, piracy hasn't stopped or
slowed, it's only gotten worse.

"where you'd have to buy an album with a dozen songs to get one or two
decent."

Somehow instead of not buying albums, people continued to buy them at this
price..as if it was a matter of life and death.

