Less popular artists profit from filesharing

Written by Ernesto on November 22, 2005 

The rich get poorer and the poor get richer. That’s what filesharing does for the music industry. No wonder the RIAA is desperately trying to shutdown all filesharing activities.

A recent overview of the current literature on the effect of filesharing on record sales shows that the most popular artist (top 25%) sell less records. However, the remaining 75% of all artists actually profits from filesharing. How this is possible?

Easy, sharing increases the amount of artists you get familiar with. Especially BitTorrent sites are an excellent platform for promoting new, or less popular artists.

First of all, on BitTorrent sites the users decide what’s popular, not the radiostations, record labels and pluggers. Besides this, it’s far more easy to first download an album, listen to it, and then decide if you want to buy it or not. Sure, most of the people will not buy the album, but since you will probably tell tell your friends about this “great new album”, popularity will grow, and eventually the artist will profit from it.

An excellent example is the band Harvey Danger who offers the opportunity to download their album on their website. As soon as they decided to do this, their popularity grew. By offering their album as a download, they gained a lot of fans, collected donations, and probably sold more albums.

Something to think about…

If you don't like torrents try MP3 Fiesta. They hold nearly 67,000 albums from nearly 17,000 artists. Prices are around the $0.10 mark for single tracks with full albums coming in at roughly $1.00. Tracks are available from 192kbps and they take major credit cards and PayPal

Previously: BitTorrent & Firefox

Next: the MPAA and Bram Cohen are going to make a big announcement

88 Responses

1 Feb 15, 2006 at 22:57 by Eric

i totally agree with this…once i started DLing songs i got exposed to WAY more music i never would’ve bothered to hear…and bands i DO like i still go buy the CD to support them

2 Feb 16, 2006 at 00:18 by Ernesto

I agree a bit. People should still support their favorite bands by buying cd’s

but.

the internet and filesharing offers a great opportunity for starting bands to reach the public. Personally I don’t need some guy in a suit to decide what kind of music I should listen to.

Take a look at http://www.jamendo.com/en/

This is how it should be, we should decide what’s good. Most of the money should go to the artists, not the 10% or less they get now.

3 Feb 17, 2006 at 16:01 by zeussy

yea, i wouldnt listen to 1/3 of the bands i listen to now if i couldnt download a track or two of theirs first. coz lets face it, just buy a random cd these days often leads to u buying absolute shit

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