The trials against The Pirate Bay are in full effect here in Sweden. Yet again, the world has its eyes set on us as a few brave individuals march into 2009 holding their flags high.
But if you’re interested in the trials, you should go to live.piratpartiet.se instead, or just google it. Instead I’m gonna talk about some of the quite obvious things surrounding this topic. The obvious things that the recordlabels doesn’t really want to acknowledge that they even exist.
Let’s start with the most obvious of the obvious statements: Nobody is buying our CDs any more!. No shit sherlock. Well, I have got news for you guys. I don’t own a CD player. I have a CD-drive in my PC but more about that in a little bit. I don’t own a CD player, my DiscMan(tm) retired hell of a lot of years ago. It has actually been replaced by a little gadget called “MP3 Player”. The MP3 Player plays MP3 files that you buy or download from the net, or that you (legally) copy from the CDs that you (legally) purchase. That is, unless the disc contains sophisticated copy protection to prevent you from doing just that. Sony fell right into their own can of whoopass as they bundled a rootkit (a very advanced virus that acts as if it were a part of the system) with their music CDs. This wasn’t too bad in itself. It got quite bad when people figured out that this rootkit could be used to hide viruses, hacks (such as the ones for world of warcraft), or just about anything in such a way that your antivirus would never spot it, and neither would any hack protection. They had to pay quite a bit of money for it, but the problem still stands. If you buy a CD today, there is a chance it won’t work with your MP3 player. If you want to make sure, look for the small print on the CD saying something like “Digitally Enhanced/Protected”, or anything similar.
The second argument would be: But we are artists! We can’t work for free! Okay, let’s stop right there. Our favorite dude with a guitarr, Bob, records a track. He releases this track through his recordlabel. From that day on and for another 50 years Bob will now continue to make money from his track. If someone makes a remix, Bob can call his angry lawyards and get even more money. Bob has tried to make a few more successful tracks but failed. Bob and his friends are normally the guys who whine about this.
Now, let’s look at our other favorite dude, Joe. Joe is pretty damn cool, and people love his music. He puts his tracks up for free on the Internet and let people download them, send them to their friends, and Joe doesn’t worry about this. It just means that Joe’s fanbase is growing, and surely Joe is getting a lot of gigs. The CDs that he actually sell are sold on Joe’s website, where he gets to keep most of the profit. And the fans also buy the really wickedly awesome “Joe” t-shirts.
It’s not about working for free. It’s about breaking free from the old ideas and ideals. Look at all the big names in trance music; Tiesto, Armin Van Buuren, etc. All of these produce their own music, but they are also big DJs, and they are hired to play at clubs and events — that is, when they aren’t on a world tour.
Personally, I think that many artists today have got the Internet and file sharing to thank for their success. So stop with the whining and make something that people actually enjoy listening to, stop hunting them down for wanting to listen to it, and give your fans what they want.
