500.000 people pirate free album
According to Forbes, half a million people downloaded Radiohead’s new album through bittorrent and 1.2 million got it legally. It’s a good article and worth your read, but I just have to take on some of the reasoning in it:
With popular album releases, illegal download volumes normally outstrip sales, says Garland. But more surprising is that fans chose to steal music they could legally download for any price they choose.
Garland argues that this kind of digital theft is more a matter of habit than of economics. “People don’t know Radiohead’s site. They do know their favorite BitTorrent site and they use it every day,” he says. “It’s quite simply easier for folks to get the illegal version than the legal version.”
What kind of argument is that? People don’t know Radiohead’s site? Like radiohead.com? Can’t use Google? If you don’t want to pay, the checkout is easy and simple. Where do they find these “experts?”
Also, I think a lot of people might not have understood that they could have just offered Radiohead nothing for a legal download. Or people were nice and just decided not to waste Radiohead’s bandwidth if they weren’t going to pay.
Another quote from the article:
But for Doug Lichtman, an intellectual property professor at the UCLA School of Law, the volume of piracy following In Rainbows‘ release erodes the success of Radiohead’s innovation. “If the community rejects even forward-thinking experiments like this one, real harm is done to the next generation of experimentation and change,” he says.
But there is no evidence that “the community” rejected the experiment. How does Lichtman define community here anyway?. The community of habitual pirates wasn’t going to buy the album anyway. The community of Radiohead fans sure did – and in the end, that’s what matters to the band. As always, how many of the pirates would have paid for the album anyway?
And let’s face it, Radiohead isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. I am just listening to the new album (legally downloaded, I might add) and it bores me to death. According to iTunes I have skipped forward on every single song so far…
Update: I see Mathew Ingram has some interesting thoughts about this (though I think he makes bittorent look a bit too easy for the average internet user), as well as TechCrunch.
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