American rock band Counting Crows is embracing BitTorrent rather than suing every user.
American rock band Counting Crows doesn't share the same view of BitTorrent that the recording industry expresses with each and every John Doe lawsuit. The landscape of the music business is changing, and BitTorrent is the new radio. Why punish the listeners when you can embrace them? Of course, that doesn't mean the band endorses outright theft, but instead sees an audience of more than 150 million people.
"I can dwell on the negatives, but I don’t want to miss out on the fact that there’s 150 million people who I can give songs to," said Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz in an interview. "You either treat it as just a money drain, like the record companies do. Or you can treat it as it actually is, which is a conduit, meaning it runs both ways."
"You can either cry about it or make use of it. File-sharing is no different from the rest of the Internet, it is a tool that connects the entire world. It is the cure for Babel," Duritz added.
Counting Crows is the latest -- and probably the biggest -- artist to use BitTorrent's promotional program. The band released its latest studio album -- Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did On Our Summer Vacation) -- just last month, but decided to offer a promotional bundle on BitTorrent for free. The bundle includes the songs Untitled (Love Song), Like Teenage Gravity, Hospital, and Meet on the Ledge, high-resolution album artwork and liner notes from Duritz.
The internet is an important tool, he said. The band realized this early on in its career and launched a message forum back in 1995. Even more, they think bands are better off with the Internet despite labels bickering about how file-sharing is killing the business.
"Record business was never all that great for bands. It was always a 99-percent failure rate of bands. Even if you did do well record labels took 80-percent of your revenue and locked up your rights. And they are completely incompetent," Duritz said. "On the Internet [independent] bands can survive. Perhaps they don’t become megastars, but at least they can survive and thrive. And there’s a lot of great music out there right now."
The great part about the Internet is that users can make their own music stations. This is where BitTorrent plays a vital role.
"If you got 150 million people on BitTorrent, then that’s the new radio station," he said. "That’s a better radio station in fact, because people have the choice to play it as much as they want and stop when they get sick of it. I can’t believe everybody’s not doing it. It’s a no brainer to me and now that we’re an independent band we don’t have to listen to a bunch of idiots who tell us what we should or shouldn’t do. We can have smart people or we can trust ourselves."
To read the entire interview, head here. Perhaps every band, movie studio and game developer should ditch their publisher and offer portions of their work for free on BitTorrent. After all, who is usually the most vocal about piracy anyway?
Depends on what you listen to. I prefer electronic music - mostly hardstyle, jumpstyle and full-on trance - and there's tons of great music of these genres out there. I also listen to Queen, Metallica and similar old bands, and their quality either have not gone down at all (2009 album by Metallica, Death Magnetic, is epic) or they simply don't make music anymore, so nothing to worry about.
On the other hand, bands like Scooter, Infected Mushroom and a few others have definitely screwed up their last albums. so maybe you have a point...
... but you still can't say that they quality of music have gone downhill. More like, the demands of the consumers did. Most teens today won't bother with forming their own tastes, they'll just listen to what's "popular", hence so-called "artists" can get away with any crap.
Alot of mainstream music has gone downhill because the big record companies have fine tuned their strategy, making deals with popular radios (radio 1) to get their shit pumped out at ideal times and then idiot's buy them on shittunes.
A band/singer will make more money from concerts anyway. Imo just get your own website with the ability to donate and then post links to the free downloads.
I think you are talking about MTV
Where is the Dig Hammer!??... I want a poster of this... now!
I found them at their excellent BP Empire album ^^
after that things deteriorated imho -- tried to start singing and cross genres while still pushing the new shit to the same old crowd who did not all appreciate their "evolution" ... really took the wind out of a few Great parties they played live at : /
The first thing that comes to mind when i see this is......All those "new" songs that are just hacked up oldies and even newer songs. Remakes are ok(for the most part), but just taking a sample from a song and looping it or making it into the chipmunks is just BAD.
In that point I CAN agree.
You can still get lots of good music today, just have to filter out more junk.
A thousand times this. The only people involved with music that are being hurt here are the labels (which can crash and burn IMO) and possibly the mega-artists. Small bands are thriving more than ever, which to me is vastly more important than the top 100, etc.