Unknown band's album illegally downloaded 100,000 times. Or is it? | Hacker News Reader

Unknown band's album illegally downloaded 100,000 times. Or is it?

torrentfreak.com

42 pointsmopoke12 comments

Here is a blog post from the band manager yesterday. http://www.camerontilburypublicity.com/post/2011/04/03/Illeg...

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?

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.

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 ;-)

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?!

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.

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...

> 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.

"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.

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