Today is the release date for the new Red Hot Chili Peppers CD, "Stadium Arcadium". About a week ago, the album was leaked onto the Internet -- which angered the band no end. In a rambling open letter, the band's bass player Flea said he and his colleagues would be heartbroken if fans downloaded the album beforehand. "I cannot put into words how much this record, 'Stadium Arcadium,' means to us, how sacred the sound of it is to us, and how many sleepless nights and hardworking days we all had thinking about how to make it be the best sounding thing we could and now, for someone to take it and put it out there with this poor sound quality it is a painful pill for us to swallow," he added. So is the concern that the leak will impact sales on today's official release. I worked with RHCP some twenty years ago when I was at EMI and they were then on the label (they are now a Warner act). I feel their pain and can appreciate their concerns.
This of course isn't the first time a pre-release leak has occurred; recently Ryan Adams and Janet Jackson have also been victims. And U2's "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" was also leaked prior to its release to lots of publicity and vocal tirades by the band; it caused them severe consternation.
Under a provision of the 2005 Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, which makes it a separate crime to pirate music and movies before their official release date, these pirates each face up to 11 years in prison if they are tracked down and convicted.
But does this piracy really impact sales of these CDS in a material fashion, or does the publicity that's generated by these occurrences actually bolster sales for the artist? Is there some kind of alternative that might thwart the impact of these actions -- say the artist pre-releasing versions of songs as they are being recorded? Allowing the fans perhaps to vote for the song that should be the single prior to the label making that decision? I wonder if artists couldn't reverse the impact, if in fact they engaged the fans in pre-release activities -- in the process engendering greater fan loyalty, inspiring viral marketing and support by the fans, and greatly mitigating the impact of pre-release piracy activities.
Food for thought.......I'm interested in hearing comments and other perspectives on this scenario.
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Read More Entries by Kelli Richards.
Mick Jones (formerly of the Clash) has a band, Carbon/Silicon, that does that sort of thing.
At the Grammy Producers’ Soundtable a few years back, Bob Ezrin (Pink Floyd, Jane’s Addiction, many more) said he doesn’t let even band members take home rough mixes from the studio anymore, because he’s had cases where a gardener or housemaid had pilfered a CD-R and uploaded the rough mixes. In fact, when the time came for the panelists to play snippets from their upcoming projects, Ezrin sat out.
BT, who was on the same panel, then joked, “Well, I’ve already been playing this live for a year, so you can sample and MP3 the hell out of it.” In that sense, his fans already had voted for the song; because he’d been playing it live, he knew it was good. And he’d already made some money off of it.
Perhaps we’ve become too wedded to the idea that the CD is the definitive performance of the song. Now that music doesn’t require a physical container, distributing multiple versions should become commonplace.
Of course, the artist who doesn’t tour is now at a disadvantage. In that case, communicating directly with the fans through the Web might be the solution. But feeding the fanbase regularly would be very time-consuming.
Do you know how Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine did? That was the album the record company refused to release, provoking a fan to upload the masters. It subsequently came out in a much different version. That’s not a direct comparison with RHCP, of course, but it may demonstrate that music can succeed despite rampant pre-release piracy.