Can “Piracy” have desirable effects?
I just heard of a band called O.A.R — “Of a Revolution.” I happened to check out their wiki page, and was amazed at what I saw.
Apparently, this band — five students at the Ohio State University — ended up selling 1.2 million albums in their still-continuing career, attributing their success to what the RIAA would call “piracy.” My first thought was Holy crap, how is this a bad thing?
Now, I have no idea if this is just an edge case, or if this is actually congruent with the rest of “music piracy”, but it seems to follow that O.A.R benefited from people copying and sharing songs. Do all musicians benefit in this manner? Maybe. I have no statistics or scientific proof, but it seems obvious enough that copying isn’t piracy if the distributor wants their stuff to be copied.
Here is a related article by Andy Oram (an O’Reilly editor) on this line of thinking. From 4 years ago no less.
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2004/08/before_you_speak_of_informatio.html
I think file sharing networks are probably great for new bands starting out. It allows their popularity to spread faster than by word of mouth alone. However, at some point, every band would want people to start buying their albums and not pirating them…otherwise they wouldn’t make any money.
It seems to me that even popular bands might think about releasing one or two songs from a new CD for free download. That would still raise interest without hurting profits (in theory).
OAR didn’t get big from ‘piracy’ they got big from independently selling thousands of drunken college kids bad fourth rate wannabe-DMB music out of their dorm rooms. They also played a lot of bad live music to a lot of drunken kids. These kids would tape the shows and send them to other drunken kids across America. Trading of live recordings is not illegal if the band has an open trading and taping policy.
They pretty much are a fourth rate Dave Matthews Band. They pretty much followed their approach on everything. (Which was based off The Grateful Dead’s) Their record sales can be attributed to the following/copying successful a method for success :
1) playing a ton of live shows
2) targeting the right audience (drunken frat boys)
3) getting the right management (Red Light Management, DMB’s management from the very begining)
4) the end of prohibition
People pirating OAR makes no sense. People dumb enough to like OAR aren’t smart enough to pirate. And those smart enough to pirate, are smart enough to know the band sucks.
Not to play devil’s advocate (but, *also* to play devil’s advocate
), I like OAR, and I’m not a frat boy. Oh, and off the record, I /have/ copied an mp3 or two in my day.
As far as them being a DMB wannabe, I don’t know — but if they are, that must be why I like them.