As Neil Young put it, "Piracy is the new radio".<p>A pirate torrent site providing promotion for artists at the artists' request is not something new. Private music torrent trackers have been doing this for several years now.<p>For example, take Anamanaguchi (a NY based band). Their 2009 album, "Dawn Metropolis" was featured, at Anamanaguchi's request, on Waffles and soon became the #1 most downloaded album on that tracker. A year later Anamanaguchi was cutting the soundtrack for Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Yes, this kind of promotion <i>really</i> works.<p>What scares the big record labels is not that piracy is the new radio, but that <i>they don't control it</i>. It becomes very difficult to predict what will become successful if music trends are left to arise organically from the listeners themselves rather than board-room focus groups. A lack of predictability is bad for an industry that is in the habit of throwing millions of promotion dollars behind artists in order to manufacture success. If the labels can't predict the trends, how do they know which horses to back? While theft of music is certainly an issue, I think it's of secondary concern to labels. It's the unpredictability that piracy is injecting into popular music that is really going to mess up their business.
Something about this rubs me up the wrong way.<p>Certainly I can imagine many bands would like to be mentioned on the front page of the pirate bay, it is a major website and a major piece of free advertising. However, the first sentence:<p>"While the major record labels and movie studios do what they can to shutter The Pirate Bay, thousands of lesser known artists are eager to become featured on the site’s homepage."<p>Seems unreasonable to me. I have no problem with bands who want to be on the pirate bay being there. I don't think even the music industry would complain about people giving their music away for free if they want to. The problem is putting up the music of people who don't want to be there.
Panacea is when more artists can give more music away and still profit. Freemium based on consumption, or increased reliance on alternative revenue channels. Either way, IMHO the technology exists today to disaggregate the middlemen in music, lower the price point for customers, and still net profit to artists. In particular, I believe almost every function of a label can be crowd sourced or productized. Vested interests are what have gotten in the way.