Then, just one day after the October 7th leak, Undercover ran a story, claiming that Sony was flooding BitTorrent sites with fakes in an attempt to frustrate potential downloaders of ‘Black Ice’. TorrentFreak investigated these claims and couldn’t find any fakes on the most commonly used BitTorrent trackers and it’s pretty certain that fakes wouldn’t exist on any private trackers either. Calls for Undercover to clarify the basis for the claim have gone unanswered.

However, there is something exciting to report in respect of this leak. During the last 5 years when most recording artists have experienced a drop in CD sales, AC/DC have been flourishing, last year selling 1.3 million CDs in the US alone. For a band that hasn’t released any new music for 8 years, never releases a ‘greatest hits’ album and does not sell any of its music online in digital format, this is pretty impressive.

Of course, AC/DC might not want to distribute their music online, but there are plenty of other people who are happy to do so. Since the album leaked to BitTorrent on October 7th, a full 13 days in advance of its worldwide release date, ‘Black Ice’ has been downloaded an incredible 400,000 times, which is a pretty clear indicator that AC/DC fans would like the band’s music in digital format rather than just CD. On Mininova, one of the world’s most popular BitTorrent download locations, four of the top five most downloaded music torrents in the last week are AC/DC.

Other ‘winners’ in the BitTorrent music download charts this week were Keane, coming in at #3 with 80,000 downloads of their album ‘Perfect Symmetry‘ (due to be released officially tomorrow) and Oasis in second position with 100,000 downloads of ‘Dig Out Your Soul‘.

Just this week, Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher said he believes that the music industry loses around 25% of its profits to piracy. “That’s what was spent on champagne and limos,” he said, adding, “It’s good when record companies panic. They need to streamline. Just like these big banks going under, and those Wall Street idiots driving Ferraris. What about people who had a hurricane rip apart their community? That’s real pressure, my friend.”

Whether artists actually lose money from ‘illegal’ downloads is something that can be debated. However, it is clear that refusing to make music available online will boost pirated downloads significantly. In just a few days the downloads of ‘Black Ice’ on BitTorrent equal a third of all AC/DC’s physical album sales last year. Quite a shocker.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Big names like Nine Inch Nails, 50 Cent, Joss Stone, Duffy and Travis have all had positive things to say recently.

But before supporting file-sharing becomes mainstream and we don’t have to report it anymore, Noel Gallagher from the 50 million album-selling band Oasis has been chatting with Zane Lowe from the UK’s Radio 1 about many things, including (of course) file-sharing.

Whilst discussing the forthcoming Oasis album, Gallagher notes that a reporter from a UK national newspaper called him, explaining that the tracks had already been leaked onto the Internet:

“I had a guy from a national newspaper track me down and say ‘Have you got any comment to make? All of your new album has come up on the Internet!’ and I was going, ‘It’s impossible, it’s ludicrous’, because only four or five people had copies. So I said ‘Read out the song titles that are up on the Internet’ and he read out the track-listing from the last album! So I was like, ‘That’s on the Internet is it? It’s also in HMV – in the ‘O’ section…..you idiot.”

So, how would Noel have felt if the tracks from the new album had really leaked onto the Internet? Would he get angry?

“No, it’s one of those things,” he told Zane. “If it’s out there and you can get it, you know, go ahead. I’m certainly not going to get into Lars Ulrich mode about this.”

Unlike singer Duffy, who has been enjoying downloading for some time now, Noel doesn’t partake himself: “It’s well documented, I don’t even have a computer and I don’t get involved in that type of gear,” he told the Radio 1 host.

But what does Noel think of other people sharing music via P2P?

“If people are willing to have faceless CDs like that in their collection, good for them. It would be absolutely ludicrous for a rock-star to demand that people pay money for albums because the kids haven’t got that much money to pay for an album, so if they can find it for free, go ahead! But don’t do it on Oasis records though – because that’s against the law.”

Not missing a chance to have a little rivalry with other UK bands, he encourages file-sharers to look at some other bands instead: “Pinch as many Kaiser Chiefs as you like – and the Pigeon Detectives – but don’t nick any Oasis!”

The new album, Dig Out Your Soul, is out on October 6th 2008. Noel would like everyone to buy it since he says he is “down to my last £4 million”. If that wasn’t bad enough, he says he needs to “keep the Evian water topped up in my swimming pool.”

Thanks to Skid

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.