Seven Days Of Sound: The pirates are murdering our music

Re:Connect records' Neil Briggs continues his weekly blog on the travails of running a top breakbeat label with a missive on the problem with pirates. And no, it's got nothing to do with a habit of mislaying treasure maps

"Home taping is killing music." That was the big thing when I was a lad. These days, the medium has changed, but the issue of people illegally getting music for free is a constant source of frustration, not only for labels and artists, but for people reading stuff in the press and online too. It seems that it's the most talked about subject in the world, and still there seems to be little to no solution for it.

I don't want to bang on about it for too long, but it's an important and annoying element of running a label - especially one that it takes a lot of hard work and effort to run, and where the sales are that much smaller - breaks being a pretty niche market.

I recently heard a nightmare scenario from a friend of mine who's a producer, artist, and label owner, and had a HUGE release on his label. It got great reviews, fantastic DJ reactions and support, and yet extremely disappointing sales through the main digital outlet - Beatport. On closer inspection, he managed to find torrent downloads of the complete release totalling nearly 4,000. This was on one site alone.

Do the maths, people - if these were translated into bonafide legal, paid-for downloads, you'd be looking at a serious cash injection into a tiny label run by pretty much one person. You'd be looking at more money available for promotion, more money available for remixes for future projects, and ultimately more incentive for the artists to want to make better, or equally good tracks in future. It's all about investment in people and growing independent labels.

It's fair to say that my label and artists don't have quite the same level of profile (and therefore "torrentabililty") as this particular artist, but the threat is always there of people sharing this music around. Several times I've been informed of blog sites giving away Re:Connect releases, and usually if you contact the people running the site it's removed quite quickly. The point is, it shouldn't be there in the first place, unless permission has been sought from the label.

I'm a modern guy, I know times change. The net is a fantastic place for promotion, and I'm more than willing to get into bed with bloggers etc (in a figurative sense of course) to help the promotion of my releases, as this can only aid the profile building process. Have some sense though people, get in touch, ask questions, and we can all find a way to work together.

Tags: breakbeat, breaks, higheight, reconnectrecords, sevendaysofsound

Comment by Martin Moves on April 3, 2009 at 6:05pm: Such a shame to hear about these kind of things happening....same for my label Audio Bug, sort of in flux due to these kind of things...very disheartening but needs to be disscussed...do people care at all? i hope so... would anyone even admit they do this? ...seems like more than a few are.... Support Breakbeat...support music ...contribute in some way. Independants...don t think there will be such a thing in the future....

Comment by steelz on April 6, 2009 at 1:39pm: vinyl ftw

Comment by The bard on April 6, 2009 at 2:31pm: Good article. I'm wondering however how many bloggers take their own work seriously enough to consider asking the label for permission - and how many would expect they can work something out.

Community building is probably one of the hardest things to do online for a label. Linking in to existing communities tho might be the way forward.

Comment by thisisbreaks.com on April 6, 2009 at 2:37pm: I am unsure about this one ... from one point of view (and as someone who's starting to put out their own tracks) I take the attitude that all music piracy is wrong. On the other hand, there seems to be a real opposition in the breaks community towards giving away anything for free. I read a lot of blogs, and they constantly are able to attract readers by giving away free stuff, which then benefits the artist in some way too as they get exposure. I would love to be able to do this on thisisbreaks.com but need more labels to come forward and work with us in a fashion that suits everyone. Then we might get more breaks material onto important charts like Hype Machine.

Possibly uploading songs to a server with a time limit (like YouSendit) is the way forward I think. Or was talking to Rennie P the other day and he suggested artists making edits of tracks which are different to the version you can pick up at Beatport etc

Comment by High Eight on April 6, 2009 at 2:45pm: Yeah I think giving away edited versions is a great idea. All these blog appear on face value to be "promoting the artists" and all downloads are given "for evaluation purposes only". Evaluation purposes could easily be a 128kbps MP3 - good enough to listen to in full, but not good enough to play in a club.

That said, surely if the track is only given away for evaluation purposes, surely hearing it in a mix is good enough for that?

Comment by thisisbreaks.com on April 6, 2009 at 3:00pm: well exactly ... and i also wonder whether the benefits of publicity are as great for a smaller artist. someone with lots of hype, like Foamo, for instance, is probably getting enough gigs that they don't mind losing a few sales. But is that going to work for a breaks artist with a more niche appeal? it's a difficult one, but we are definitely up for working with labels in this way if they are interested.

Comment by High Eight on April 6, 2009 at 3:07pm: I think any blogger worth dealing with will work WITH labels, not against them.

*goes to work on new mix for thisisbreaks.com*

;)

Comment by thisisbreaks.com on April 6, 2009 at 3:10pm: yay!

Comment by Peo de Pitte on April 17, 2009 at 10:24am: The thing that made the blogger phenomena so big was all these hosting sites that has been popping up the last year. Rapidshare, Zippyshare, Mediafire etc etc.

They have a hosting site for files (!) which is 99% copyright protected material and they make money on it. All these songs and shit with huge traffic wouldnt be that dominant on the blogs because the bloggers dont have hosting space or want to pay for it. There would be an option to actually buy the tracks and or programs.

I dont really mind my tracks being on blogs but I'm not that happy with other companies indirectly making money out of my music.... And I don't think anyone is...