this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Whenever I release music myself, I actively block it in Russia, because they relentlessly steal my trance / freeform releases and upload them in warez sites.
Of course geoblocking can be circumvented by a determined pirate but it helps to not be on their radar in first place as a lesser known artist.
As an example, once I released a freeform album. Freeform is a very niche, small scene. It was on Russian forums within a couple of days. Fortunately one of my fans notified me, I had a Russian friend contact the site on my behalf to explain that I'm a poor struggling artist, and they're literally taking money out of my pocket; to my surprise they agreed to take the links down.
Did the sales increase as an effect of them taking it down?
Hard to say really. I'm fairly sure if it was available online for free, less people would have bought it.
When you're talking only £2000 or so of sales for a small indie release, piracy makes a huge hit to sales. My more popular stuff like trance, the sales drop off a cliff the moment it's leaked. There was a huge problem with people on promo lists leaking pre-released tracks to warez sites, not sure if the main labels (eg ones like Armada, Anjuna etc) ever got to the bottom of it, but it really hurt the sales of people who aren't exactly making bank from their music
It can go both ways since a lot of people discover music through piracy too
I guess, I just don't see many people getting something for free then deciding to go buy it out of the goodness of their heart... maybe I'm too pessimistic.
I try not to pirate music production software because I make some small money from my music, and I've personally seen companies go bust and get snapped up by Apple because everyone (me included) justified pirating their small plugins as "they're making lots of money anyway". But I justify pirating shit like Adobe to myself I hate paying a subscription to use software. I dunno maybe more people have this mindset than I realise and are happy to pay after 'trying before buying'.
I'm interested to hear responses from anyone who genuinely buys the music they enjoy after pirating it. Why would they not just buy it in the first place?
They pay if they see you as a person, not just a name on the music.