Netlabelism 
Despite the anti-piracy warnings and ads inserted into mainstream media, it is still very easy to illegally download music. File sharing websites like Megaupload and Fileserve were shut down for hosting content that served as a middle man between uploaders and the general public that doesn’t want to pay for music while generating advertising and subscription revenue. Kim Dotcom (legal name), the proprietor of Megaupload was arrested and served a probation sentence. I’m sure you can find his “week in prison” memoir available for download somewhere, but who cares? The most recent, and fascinating form of piracy is coming from Russian websites like legalsounds.com that sell discounted music without permission from the artists. Not to mention the fact that you should avoid giving these people your credit card information or allowing them to add tracking cookies to your PC. They are not legitimate in any way. In fact, their website states: “All the materials in the LegalSounds.com music service are available for distribution via Internet according to license ЛС-3М-05-09 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society.” There is no way this law would actually permit them to do this.
Netlabel artists like Ophed who composes “perpetual fluid/motion element soundscapses” are the ones breaking the mold by offering their music for free. However, the ability to release and have their music heard world-wide and for free is the basis of building their audience. As you can imagine his label Etched Trauma was not happy to see his catalog for sale at $.45 per track:
“I understand them selling Beatles or Springsteen but I wonder what on earth they were thinking ripping off a small Greek Netlabel and a Québécois artist…”
Upsetting, but not shocking. Music piracy has been evolving and growing along with the industry itself, typically staying one step ahead of mainstream media’s learning curve. Did Mozart have the disheartening, yet oddly satisfying feeling of walking down the street and seeing bootleg sheet music to ‘Don Giovanni’ sprawled out on the sidewalk? Ok, that’s a bit of a stretch, (considering people rarely knew how to read or write in the 1700s) but his reaction would be the same as any artist, offended and flattered at the same time. This duality of the artists’ work being a commodity, thereby making them successful and (on the flip-side) the fact that that artist is most likely still broke and can use the money. There have been certain points in modern music, starting with cassette tapes, that made it easy to obtain your favorite song off of the radio and never shell out a penny. CD-Rs and eventually online piracy led to the downfall of the “Big Business” version of the music industry in the early 2000s. This massive change saw independent artists releasing music themselves at shows, on street corners and on their personal websites. Suddenly the internet was the best way to seek out new music. Remember myspace?…(didn’t think so)
Artists that were intelligent and capable of adapting to this de-valuing of their intellectual property would eventually carve out their own niche or starve. Mike Doughty is a shining example of an artist that was signed to a major label (with his band Soul Coughing) and watched the industry crumble around him. Since then, he has released 6 solo albums and has started his own record label. Doughty didn’t seem all that surprised to learn that his entire catalog had been uploaded to legalsounds.com.
“Getting cheated out of money sucks. The utter openness of it is infuriating. But, look: the labels brought this on themselves, partially. They bilked their customers, overcharging ridiculously. Albums were routinely released on which the single sounded nothing like the rest of it – remember the funk/metal band with the acoustic ballad, or the ska/punk band with the groovy lounge tune? – and killed the 45/cassette-single/CD single, so you’d be forced to overpay. They also didn’t come up with a viable alternative. They had years to do so, but did nothing. Steve Jobs stepped in with a new model, and they were forced to go along with it.”
Well put, sir.
This adversely affected his career in the short term, but allowed him to sell copies of his debut album “Skittish” in white jacket copies on-stage (literally) at his solo gigs. He has sold thousands of albums and developed a dedicating fanbase despite it being leaked onto Napster, the original peer to peer downloading forum. I can understand this being a frustrating transition but it allowed him to transition from being a Beat-Poet frontman to a songwriter without the limitations of the abstract. However, I really feel for bands like the Fear Nuttin Band. They’re a Massachusetts based band that releases their own records and tours regionally and their albums were featured under the “Hot Releases” tab. This was their reaction.
“We weren’t aware of this and its unfortunate that people take what isn’t theirs and try to sell it. People shouldn’t trust getting music from sites like these unless you want viruses (and stuff like that). On the other hand, if it gets a few new fans then we still get our music out there.”
It is entirely possible that these artists may be able to pick up a new fan or two, but at what cost? It seems that these artists are all taking it in stride and still working hard to create and release music on their own terms. The reason we don’t villianize the general public for stealing our music is the hope that they will buy your next album or a concert ticket, or tell their friends about you. People tend to be more generous once they’ve decided they want you to succeed. There is no justification for someone to profit from your intellectual property.
After consistent emailing, Ophed’s releases were pulled from the site. They have yet to respond to any of the emails.
Artwork by Lauri Horton
this type of websites that are trying to sell any and all kind of music for cheap aren’t really new. i remember them from atleast back in 2005. they are usually selling tracks by 50 cents or something equally cheap and a credit system of some sort. they are also usually of russian origin, with known ties to russian mafia.
you can find some stories on labels and artists trying to get their tracks offline with more or little success. if you are persistent they end up removing your tracks just to shut you up. bigger label associations have been trying to shut these type of sites down for quite a while now – one of the few things they are tried to do that actually makes sense – as i recall they even threatened with comercial sanctions to russia if their authorities wouldnt act on them a couple years back. some of them were shutdown and others popped up replacing them, the makers even went as far as to transfer the credits from some of the sites to others they also owned, to keep their clients loyal or something. not with much success as far as i can tell. also, i wouldnt recommend anyone to share their credit card with one of those sites.
they work with web scrappers, basically searching all music blogs and mp3 distribution channels for mp3s (legal or not), then parse their id3 tags and add them to their database. its not exactly proof checked by humans to confirm if tracks are famous enough to worth distributing. then they have several clones of their sites (if you go to standard webdev freelance forums you often see requests for cloning the frontend of these kind of sites, which is in itself perfectly legal). they also have dummy server squatted domains linking to their different sites to fool google rating system to rank them higher. so when you search for something famous .mp3 you get their special offer listed higher and even if you as a user dont buy the track they still get the adverts revenue.
would be interesting if someone at google or the internet archive could show us some stats on how these kind of sites have been doing through the years. wonder if anyone ever did a thesis or paper on the subject.
what is interesting to notice is that, these sites, just like pirated cds and dvds at flea markets, strived due to the lack of legitimate (and affordable) alternatives. now the further proliferation of itunes / bandcamp / beatport / last.fm / spotify is starting to turn the consumer pirates back into legal consumers, and these kind of pirate sites have a harder time making enough to pay the maintenance to be worth the bother. but we still have a very long way to go to reach a real democratization of digital content providers: nowdays it’s still an investment to have the work of a starting artist available on digital content providers, the artist is forced to pay to have his work available for distribution, and most of the higher audience sites don’t allow the artist to give his work away for free. so it’s still a middle man scheme where both the artists and the consumers are losing. considering for how little the piracy sites try to sell the tracks it makes you wonder how costly it is indeed to operate a music distribution platform.
my utopia in this regard would be an open source, decentralized, with interoperable and transparent nodes system to handle this business. so each artist or label could run their own node as providers and seemlessly and transparently communicate with other nodes that operate as distributers. doesnt seem likely to succeed in the world of men.