Iron Maiden Plan Tour Using BitTorrent
The music industry was turned on it's head near the turn of the century when Napster and peer-to-peer file-sharing essentially ended what had been a gilded era of $20 CDs being sold with two radio hits at a massive record store. That all changed as the P2P network and then the rise of torrents increasing pushed music online and into the digital realm. As bands and artists saw their discographies pilfered by online "pirates," new strategies were put in place, grandmas were arrested and Steve Jobs convinced everyone to start selling their songs for a dollar apiece, the album format be damned.
While that sequence of events has led to exponentially more free music than we've ever enjoyed, it has also meant declining revenue for labels and artists who have had to innovate and experiment with new strategies to keep the game going. One of the more interesting ways I've seen this happen is the way heavy metal group Iron Maiden recently turned the tables on the pirates, by analyzing where their music was downloaded on the popular BitTorrent download client to decide where to route their next tour.
The logic was simple: if they're willing to steal the music, they probably like it a lot. MusicMetric, a UK company that specializes in analytics for the music industry by capturing everything from social media discussion to traffic on the BitTorrent network, crunching the figures to determine an act's popularity in certain locales. "Having an accurate real time snapshot of key data streams is all about helping inform people's decision making. If you know what drives engagement you can maximize the value of your fan base. Artists could say ‘we're getting pirated here, let's do something about it’, or ‘we're popular here, let's play a show’," said Gregory Mead, CEO and co-founder of the London-based firm in a press release.
While it first was reported by Complex and Rolling Stone that Iron Maiden actively used this information to route their latest tour, the band has since denied anything of the sort. While their dates seem to have coincided with MusicMetric data suggesting large fan bases in South and Central America, where they have since played several successful shows, the band is not ready or willing to be the poster child for mining piracy data into usable information.
About a month ago I posted a story about comedian Russel Brand releasing his latest stand up via popular torrent search engine The Pirate Bay, utilizing the site's popularity to push his product for free, which he also interestingly sold as well. The UK seems to have the first fascination in manipulating piracy networks for their own gain, which may be a sign of the digital age ravaging the old guard in a country where 70% of independent record stores have closed. It seems to be getting to the point of adapt or die, who would have thought it'd be Iron Maiden's lead to follow?
Russell Brand Releases DVD on The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay is like the Napster of the contemporary Internet era. Founded in Sweden in 2003, the BitTorrent site has skirted the edges of the web, providing free movies and music to the masses and becoming public enemy No. 1 for recording companies, film studios and actors and musicians alike. With this as the backdrop, it's interesting that comedian Russel Brand chose to release his latest DVD, Messiah Complex, via the unapologetic piracy website.
Interestingly, the stand-up DVD is available online on Amazon or BBC for £10. While he stands to lose money that could be made from the actual sales, Brand is somewhat following in the footsteps of fellow comedian Louis C.K. who released his 2011 stand-up routine, Live at the Beacon Theater online in an easy-to-pirate format, simply asking for $5 with a request not to steal it. Surprisingly, C.K. made just over $1 million in the course of a couple days with the ploy-perhaps spurring the move by Brand.
While the entertainment industry continues to persecute the open-source piracy community, it will be interesting to watch how certain aspects of free releases have seeped into popular culture. Today, musicians put out free releases everyday in the forms of mixtape and albums-whose to say we can't see a similar trend begin to occur in the film/comedy realm as well? It's not completely out of the question and may be a breath of fresh air.
Before Sean Fanning and Napster turned the Music world on its head in the late 90s, record labels dictated who was hot and what was good-today music is as open as its ever been, allowing fans to dictate prices and artist's popularity. With movies these days getting less and less creative as directors increasingly pull from remakes, maybe a few free releases wouldn't be the worst thing.
[via Complex]