5000 Artists Line Up For a Pirate Bay Promotion | Hacker News Reader

5000 Artists Line Up For a Pirate Bay Promotion

torrentfreak.com

98 pointsjoeyespo18 comments

This get's to the real reason the RIAA hates the piracy. Once someone is internet famous they don't need promoters to start making good money. When someones is actually good they can keep making good money just from word of mouth. Because when you get down to it Advertising is the only thing recording labels bring to the equation now days.

That's not to say people won't sign on. Just that once your making good money your less interested in signing a deal that gives 90% of the profits to a record company. And that power imbalance is why record company's can be so profitable in the first place.

  > Advertising is the only thing recording labels
  > bring to the equation now days

Also:

* Payola... errr.. I mean radio air time

* Connections to top-notch producers / audio engineers / directors (music videos) / etc.

Exactly! Good record labels book venues, organize travel, handle the legal stuff like insurance etc, they are well connected and know people at the radio stations and know the bloggers, they can introduce them to other bands/producers/video editors, ... in short: they make sure that the band can concentrate on their music and that the target audience knows about them

So record labels won't go away, they should maybe rename themselves because of the automatic negative response you get when you hear the word "record label"

"Exactly! Good record labels book venues, organize travel, handle the legal stuff like insurance etc, they are well connected advertising and know people at the radio stations advertising and know the bloggers,advertising they can introduce them to other bands/producers/video editors,advertising ... in short: they make sure that the band can concentrate on their music and that the target audience knows about them advertising"

Edit: If your promoters don't consider such things advertising find someone better that understands the industry.

PS: 'book venues' is easy, it's filling them that's hard and that take advertising. Don't forget bands also have an agent often handles a lot of this stuff a well.

To play devil's advocate for a second. They do offer a bit more than just advertising. And that in itself is pretty important as well, even if you are actually good.

Record labels have a lot in common to VCs, sure you can bootstrap your company and do all the needed marketing and development yourself, go viral and scale without getting money from anyone. But for some companies taking money from VCs make sense, they wouldn't know what to do nor have enough resources to without help.

But I do agree with what you're trying to say. While record labels do more than just advertising. Everything they do is getting easier and easier to do without them. They're becoming irrelevant in many different fronts. I just don't believe they're 100% irrelevant... yet, but that only means there's room for startups to innovate.

Pretty sure what the RIAA hates is that the top 100 on sites like TPB is all their stuff, the stuff TPB promoted is at the other end of the popularity list. Online promotion in much stronger forms has been around for years without much result.

It's amazing when you think that pirates give aware their bandwidth and storage to distribute your files for free. 30 years ago, the manufactor, storage, and physical distribution of media (music/films) was expensive and the idea that customers would do it for you for free would have sounded absurd. And yet here we are now.

If bandwidth were metered and people paid per byte, I think the amount of sharing would drop. People share their bandwidth because they are paying for downstream and they also happen to get a chunk of upstream bandwidth with that.

Regarding storage, they need to store the item locally to consume it. There are probably very few individuals that store all the torrents they've ever downloaded in perpetuity and remain as seeders of those.

But yes, I agree that regardless of the causing circumstances, the fact that people are all making copies of things and sharing them is remarkable. I think it is analogue to what a lot of people want to see with 3D printing.

Replace "bandwidth and storage" with "the transportation of raw materials," and torrent software with 3D printing, and you've got yourself an interesting sea change in the manufacturing industry. I wonder if they will lobby with the same intensity that the RIAA and MPAA have.

Reminds me of Cory Doctorow's speech "The coming war on general-purpose computing", which is basically, yes, there will be a massive, more powerful lobby. http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

I like the idea. Here's hoping for the rise of the independent artist, and for better channels for the consuming of more diverse content. There is soooo much music out there, and sooo much good music that we will never know about. There just HAS to be a better way for me to get my muisc fix, than for a few labels and some hipster blogs here and there cramming the same crap down my throat. (and this maps to all areas of art as well)

Perhaps worth a listen? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuMCEhZ4eIw

I hope they're giving it away because judging by the dude featured in TF's rhetoric that space is worthless - nobody using TPB cares about him: 457 seeding, 3 leeching, and just 85,000 views on his video from a site with millions of daily visitors.

"[...]just 85,000 views[...]" ???

He's not Britney Spears, he's a guy that's looking for enough name recognition to fill clubs on the road. That's all you need if you don't think you're above working for a living.

It's the conversion that's worrying - Pirate Bay sees millions of impressions a day. To only convert that into 85,000 low-friction video views is pretty bad. Given these numbers, I don't think TPB advertising is very attractive when weighed against other media - I think the main draw is that it's free.

The conversion is low but you inadvertently stated the reason. They see millions of impressions for people wanting a large assortment of different content. Honestly, most probably go there for TV/Movies/Porn.

It isn't going to see the sort of conversion rates you might see on a site like The Hype Machine where users are there primarily for music discovery.

We're doing it to give back. That is classic.

Is that why Pirate Bay seems down?

Seems fine to me: http://thepiratebay.se/

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