New Zealand Shows Music Piracy Boosts Sales

vik writes "According to This NZ news article it appears local music is being boosted by piracy. Strangely, their Associate Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage, Judith Tizard, supports this when she warns that "... while sales of local music are high, so are illegal copies of New Zealand albums." Unfortunately as always, government bodies don't seem to be able to make the connection even when it stares them in the face."

Comments

Re:Let's remember that...

[ottffssent]

That hardly seems to be the case though, does it?

Janis Ian's got a nice article posted here ( http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.h tml ) where she very eloquently tells 'em to go shove it.

In particular, she points to the one clear experiment being conducted in this area: the Baen Free Library. If increased availability of illegal and free entertainment guts the industry, then surely increased availability of LEGAL, FREE, and PRODUCER-SANCTIONED entertainment would be its death-knell, no? Yet what happens every single time an author puts their work up on the Library? Sales jump.

So go to the Library ( http://www.baen.com/library/ ), find a good author, and buy a book. Support an author today.

Get a copy of BNL's Everything to Everyone, and go to a concert. Support a band today.

And please stop forcing me to compare the music industry to the printing industry. It's really not a good analogy.

Those heavy metal blokes sure know their marketing

[Simon Kongshoj]

An excellent example of how 'Net file sharing can actually be used deliberately to boost sales, while also making the fans happy, was how Iron Maiden promoted their latest album, Dance of Death.

The album wasn't recorded all in one go, as albums usually are, but was recorded during the breaks between tours and gigs. When Maiden had written and recorded a new song for the coming album, they'd perform it on some of the subsequent tours. Whenever they were about to play some new material, frontman Bruce Dickinson would tell the gathered hordes of Maiden fans that if they wanted to record it and share it with their friends on the Net, that was OK, "just buy the album when it gets out, right?".

So in the months before the release, tons of concert bootlegs of Wildest Dreams, Rainmaker and the title track Dance of Death were floating around the net. People's anticipation of the new album was boosted to the boiling point, and Maiden had come across as sympathetic people who wanted to share their music with the world rather than greedy Lars Ulrich clones. When the album was released, it had killer sales. Lots of people who had come across one of the aforementioned bootlegs (with poor sound quality -- you don't drag your studio quality recorder to a concert, do you? ;) ) just had to hear them in a studio version. It's likely that encouraging filesharing had actually boosted the sales of that record. At any rate, the move sure gained Maiden more respect from their fans, which I personally think is something that also translates to better sales.

I believe this is the way to do it if you're a major band -- adapting to the new reality of 'net file sharing (legal or not -- the illegal status of sharing copyrighted music obviously isn't stopping anyone) rather than whining about it.