Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Some friends and I play in a garage band for fun and guilt-free beer-drinking on weeknights (which I guess amounts to the same thing). Recently we recorded an album, and decided to create a label and release it online. We managed to get listed on iTunes, eMusic, plus physical distribution through CDBaby. It’s cheap to do, we sold a few (I suspect to friends and family), and getting “sales figures” made for some cheap entertainment.

But recently, a Google search showed us our little CD was listed on a Russian Mp3 Torrent site for free download. And then shortly afterwards, on another mp3 site. And another! We were fascinated by this: where had they got the CD from? Surely no one would bother uploading our album — I mean, who would want it aside from our friends anyway? Do these sites employ some sort of bottom trawling methodology, where they simply troll BitTorrent and scoop up whatever’s out there, in-demand or not? Or perhaps someone simply uploaded it as a form of social currency?

Oddly, one site also offers users the ability to “Download it legally for .09¢ a track!” Now, obviously we have no agreement with them, so we were mystified by the legal claim (aside from it being an outright lie). It turns out copyright law is, not surprisingly, quite different and a little murky in Russia. As long as they are giving a piece of sales to the Russian Licensing Societies, it’s arguably legal there and hard to stop -- as the RIAA found out when they finally managed to shut down the huge allofmp3.com, only to see it replaced by myriad others.

What this makes clear is that the scale of music sharing/piracy has shifted – it’s a big business now, presumably based on site traffic – as has the definition of “legal” in a global digital marketplace. And while The Porktrashers are amused to see that our album – our little album! -- has been downloaded a couple of hundred times already, if you are a big label, or anyone trying to earn a living selling music the traditional way, this can’t be amusing so much as terrifying. The question is, will this be the shift that finally forces the big labels to change their business model?

Elliott Smith