There have been many cases where bands and music labels have been publicly vocal about the fact that their album has been heavily pirated. Complaining that their business has been torn apart, most of them appear to ignore the link between accumulating many unauthorized downloads and the retail success of their product. Short and sweet – if your product is good, thousands will buy it. If your product is good, thousands will pirate it too – the two scenarios go hand in hand.

One band who thought that evil pirates were taking all their money are Sweden-based Stockholm Stoner. In a recent interview picked up by brokep of The Pirate Bay, the band explained that since releasing their album on January 21st this year, they had sold a pretty-unimpressive 379 copies.

Apparently, however, their music is a smash hit on BitTorrent, racking up an impressive 80,000 downloads. This ratio of legal to unauthorized downloads seems unprecedented and the band were quick to express their dismay. While noting that they aren’t specifically against P2P networks, the band said it “would be fun” to get paid for their work and that “adults must understand that they can not steal,” while saying that the Internet should be filtered – “..the Chinese can do it after all,” they said.

But this is the Internet, and not everything is how it seems. What could be worse than getting pirated 210 copies to every one sold? How about… not getting pirated at all? Unfortunately for the band the download stats for their album were gathered from entirely the wrong place, via scammy links on a torrent meta search engine. As can be seen from this search for Stockholm Stoner, the site shows many thousands of downloads. They are fake – you can type anything in that search box and the site will return ‘stats’.

Rather than being relieved, I can’t help but think that having found out that they’re not popular with pirates after all, the band would be hugely disappointed. Searching in the usual places, TorrentFreak couldn’t find any significant downloads of this band at all. Better to be popular and downloaded, than not downloaded at all, surely?

Another artist who claims to be hugely popular with pirates is Indiana “The Internet Police Are Coming” Gregg. In an interview with the BBC, Gregg claimed that one of her albums had been downloaded 250,000 times – a figure we found just too outrageous to be taken seriously, with our own calculations indicating this assessment was inflated by around 240,000 downloads.

Using the publicity from her spat with The Pirate Bay to great effect, Gregg went on to create Kerchoonz – a site paid for by £250,000 of public money where people could download and listen to music for free. Trying to convert ‘pirates-with-morals’ to the site, every listen or download would result in the artists getting paid, emphasized Gregg.

Indiana Gregg herself is touting her own music on the site and is actually the #4 artist in the Kerchoonz ‘Top 100′ list. Since she’s so popular with pirates (250,000 downloads remember?) she must be tearing it up on Kerchoonz. Wrong. Current stats indicate that her tracks have been streamed 1180 times and downloaded just 310 times. Presuming she’s getting paid at the same rates as the other artists on the site, Gregg netted $2 for this effort, which is exactly $2 more than she accused The Pirate Bay of giving her.

Overall it seems that getting heavily pirated is an indication of success, and a pointer that good money is to be made at retail – The Dark Knight was pirated at least a million times but has already made over $1 billion dollars worldwide.

If no-one wants to pirate your music or download it for free, don’t expect to be able to sell it either. Come back pirates, the music industry needs you.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Later she reflected on her rant, sometimes contradicting her earlier claims such as her millionaire status. So, considering the dismal status of torrents of her work, she needed another way to cash in.

Enter Kerchoonz.com. From what we can gather, it aims to be an online jukebox, mixed in with a music download service, maybe something like Jamendo. Ms Gregg’s husband, music producer Ian Morrow, explained the service to the BBC, saying “If you’re a musician you’ll upload your music to the site. Anyone plays it, you get paid. Anyone downloads it, you get paid. That’s it, simple. Everything’s free for the user.”

The main question then, is where the money will come from. Currently, they have a £250,000 investment from the Scottish Co-investment Fund. While this can fund the website initially, with a free end-user model it’s going to be incredible hard to gain any revenue. Advertising will be the only alternative, so until the site becomes popular, it will hemorrhage money. It doesn’t help that the site promises “no adverts attached!!!” which simply means that the site will be smothered in pop-ups and sponsored links. The payouts will probably be minuscule as well, so anyone expecting this to be a major source of revenue will be left unhappy.

Of course, over-exaggeration is nothing new for Gregg and Morrow. They claim they got the idea for the site after the release of Gregg’s album, “Woman at Work”. In an interview with the BBC, they claimed it had over 250,000 downloads. Our own research shows the upper limit to be more like 10,000 and the current activity of the torrents supports that. The name (Kerchoonz) appears to be derived from the word Gregg used whenever she talked about the Pirate Bay making money , kerching.

Another point to ponder is that while they claim there will be no DRM, watermarking will be used. One of the press releases for the site states “Kerchoonz tracks downloads and streams through a combination of the ISRC and play counts by utilizing unique coding and encryption within the application.” With this approach there could be privacy and profiling concerns, as with all watermarking.

Will the project succeed? At this stage it seems extremely unlikely, as there are already better services out there and any proposed rewards are likely to be extremely small. The recommendation and similarity aspects of both Pandora and last.fm have been the key to their success, letting people discover new artists. As to whether Kerchoonz will have it, who knows?

Right now, they are collecting emails and names, and a link to their privacy policy, but no actual policy. It’s polish like that that will make this public funded website go all the way…. to titsup.com. In the end, it sparks the phrase “Ave! Bossa nova, similis bossa seneca!” in that the only difference between Kerchoonz and The Pirate Bay, is that with Kerchoonz, you have a much smaller audience, but with some distant hope of getting some money back.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.