Our Battle Against The Evil World of File-Sharing.
We released two songs, a video game and a video clip just over a month ago in order to promote our new album, and to ask people to help us fund the mastering, and other costs associated with releasing an album. We are really grateful for the all support we got.
Since we didn’t quite raise enough for professional mastering, we decided that we may as well send the digital album to all those who supported us before the summer, because we’re nice like that!
And then we noticed that the album had been uploaded to a bunch of file sharing sites.
To make it very clear, it displeases us when we see our music copied and uploaded to file sharing sites such as Mediafire, Filestube, MegaUpload, etc…
What? ‘You guys are so uncool’ we hear you saying.
Well, it’s not because we don’t want people to share our music. Our music comes with a Creative Commons licence*.
This means that you are allowed to share our music (to copy, distribute and transmit the work). There are a few rules and limitations though.
Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). That’s not too difficult, our name is on the artwork.
No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
We provide remix packs with the stem tracks so you can do this.
Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
It’s the last rule that is being broken here. File Sharing sites make money either by selling premium services to downloaders (so you can download more files, or more quickly, etc…,) or by selling ad space. Sometimes, they’ll even force you to fill in a questionnaire, or give them your mobile phone number, just so you can download the stuff for free. So essentially, they are making money off the backs of artists and you are directly, or indirectly paying for the music. Not a penny goes to the artists when you do this, but the wanker who set up the website rakes in the pennies, while drinking expensive Japanese whiskey in the back of his Roll’s Royce.
It’s not about the money, a lot of our music is available for free. We’d just rather you came directly to us. We have come to terms with the fact that making music is an expensive hobby, subsidized by our day-jobs, and that it is highly unlikely that we will ever be able to sustain a career from it. So the only thing that keeps us going is knowing that people are listening to our music, enjoying it, and that the hope that we are not being exploited by Japanese whiskey drinking, posh English car driving, probably ex-major record label executive types running file sharing websites. (On a related note, check out TuneCore’s article about other upstanding citizens exploiting us poor musicians.)
So this is why we are setting up a google doc where you can legally pick up a free download code, leave us a little comment if you wish, and respect our wishes without having to give up your email address.
So rather than posting links to mediafire and whatnot, we encourage you to share the link to this document instead. http://bit.ly/p1tUub
There are a thousand codes available as of today, and we’ll add more if need be.
