Many blogs yesterday afternoon were announcing that the new Arcade Fire album had leaked, and it was pretty easy to find.
The Internet has become an immense music resource and there are now tons of pages where you can download music for free, legally, as many artists give one track of their new album for free. You get a song, you like it, so you’ll buy the album, this is the marketing idea.
But is it that clear in people’s minds? You get one for free, why would you have to pay for the rest?
Finding an album for free on the Internet before its official release has become really easy now, I can do it, so kids probably do it in half a second. But free does not mean it is not a theft.
What people call moral is very often a pretty flexible thing, they adapt it to what they want to do, finding all kinds of justifications
There are many ways to justify a free download:
– Artists are robbed by record companies anyway, since most of the money goes to the company not to the artist so downloading is not stealing the artist but the company, an already immoral industry.
People should not play their big socialist rebels when all they want is getting something for free.
– People want to sample the music, then they will buy the album if they like it.
Honestly, do you really believe this?
– People want to advertise the artist, by talking about the music they will increase the sales.
Advertise? How? People who download will just pass the free music to their friends, and there will be no sale increase there.
But if downloading is stealing, why is it so easy? Softwares for files sharing are available everywhere and downloading is very widespread. With no Internet police, how do you expect any self control?
Before the Internet, we were making copies of CDs we had bought for friends and families, and even though the impact was much more limited, it was the same idea, there is no difference between sharing an album online and burning a CD for a friend. Now the system has just become more efficient since you can share files with million of people.
Downloading is here to stay, I don’t see how we can stop it, and artists will respond differently to the situation. But between Radiohead who released ‘In Rainbows’ as a digital download that customers could order for the price they wanted, and Prince who released his ’20Ten’ album only as a CD, without any digital download services pretending the internet was dead, who would you say has the best strategy?