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Forums - General - UK Band Admits It's 'Utterly Dependent' On Piracy

ferret1094 on 28 August 2008

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080826/2227062107.shtml

At some point, it won't make sense to post these sorts of examples any more because it will just be common sense that bands can and do benefit from so-called "piracy," but every time we post one of these stories, we get people complaining that this couldn't possibly work for others. When a band is big, then it will never work for small artists. When they're small, it'll never work for big artists. Once we even had a commenter complain that it might work for big artists or small artists -- but it was the all important artists in the middle that it would never work for.

So, here we go again, with yet another example of a band that isn't worried about piracy. It's an award-winning acoustic folk duo out of the UK, called Show of Hands, where one of the members admits that one of the most popular ways that people find out about the band is when others share the band's music, and this often drives them to come out to shows and buy CDs as well. The band points out that "piracy" is a bad description of what happens:

You may call this process 'piracy' if you wish - for me it is an act of generosity and it both increases our audience size and record sales. And as I always say on the night - if you're going to do it anyway you may as well feel good about it! I believe the official term is 'viral marketing', and we depend utterly upon it.

Yet, if he listened to the RIAA or the IFPI, apparently, all this viral marketing that the band depends on would be "no different than common theft."



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Thatmax on 28 August 2008

Hey I saw these guys at Cropredy Folk festival this year... by saw I mean walk through the crowd, buy my food and walk back out, Im not a fan of folk music at all really



akuma587 on 28 August 2008

Lies. Everything the RIAA says is true. They obviously have nothing but the best interests of the artists in mind.



We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.  The only thing that really worried me was the ether.  There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke

It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...."  Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson

Dogs Rule on 28 August 2008

This is a somewhat healthy attitude. It will mean artists will become more and more like common people ( ;) ) where they earn their living from their day to day work (gigs and touring) instead of past work (royalties) which is more enclined to keep them grounded. They'll need to learn retirement planning though, since once the touring stops, so does much of their revenue.