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.