10,000 Artists Sign Up for Pirate Bay Promotion
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
A pirate torrent site providing promotion for artists at the artists' request is not something new. Private music torrent trackers have been doing this for several years now.
For example, take Anamanaguchi (a NY based band). Their 2009 album, "Dawn Metropolis" was featured, at Anamanaguchi's request, on Waffles and soon became the #1 most downloaded album on that tracker. A year later Anamanaguchi was cutting the soundtrack for Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Yes, this kind of promotion really works.
What scares the big record labels is not that piracy is the new radio, but that they don't control it. It becomes very difficult to predict what will become successful if music trends are left to arise organically from the listeners themselves rather than board-room focus groups. A lack of predictability is bad for an industry that is in the habit of throwing millions of promotion dollars behind artists in order to manufacture success. If the labels can't predict the trends, how do they know which horses to back? While theft of music is certainly an issue, I think it's of secondary concern to labels. It's the unpredictability that piracy is injecting into popular music that is really going to mess up their business.
Certainly I can imagine many bands would like to be mentioned on the front page of the pirate bay, it is a major website and a major piece of free advertising. However, the first sentence:
"While the major record labels and movie studios do what they can to shutter The Pirate Bay, thousands of lesser known artists are eager to become featured on the site’s homepage."
Seems unreasonable to me. I have no problem with bands who want to be on the pirate bay being there. I don't think even the music industry would complain about people giving their music away for free if they want to. The problem is putting up the music of people who don't want to be there.
Much as how labels didn't care about properly compensating artists, artists don't care if the labels make bad investments by relying on projected figures that no longer correspond to reality.
It devalues their product (in their mind). Competition with lower price is not good for business.
It's not that simple. Competition with lower price points can drive innovation and reduce costs and hence can lead to an increase in volume that more than makes up for the reduced prices.
In the case of digital music with a potential market of 100's of millions of consumers and a baseline of anywhere between 10K and 200K for a professionally produced piece of music it could very well be more profitable to sell your content to a much larger audience at $0.30 than to a smaller one at $.99 Without competition people would get stuck at unrealistically high price-points and we'd all be that much poorer (culturally) for that. Musique pour supermarché is a nice example of how far you could push that. It made a fraction of what it would have made if it were released.
Competition driving lower prices would unlock a much larger market. Of course from a monopoly position such competition always looks bad, especially if you can squeeze both the consumer and the producer.
This mechanism doesn't hold forever, here is a lower boundary where you will no longer be making more profits and that sweet spot is the point where most of all the sellers will congregate. Given that the cost of distribution is negligible (music tends to spread for free) you'd need a way to piggy-back onto the music being played rather than the music being transferred to side-step the issues of piracy.
Look at the top 100 torrents in any section. I just looked now at the top in films and I am positive that the copyright owner of every file there does not want their files to be on TPB.