Puddlegum

Imagine spending twelve months working on your new album. You shape the song structures a certain way to convey the emotion of each song, everything is precise. Your independent label pays for you to record the album at a professional studio, costing them $30,000, with a contract saying that you will repay the recording and reproduction costs if the album doesn’t sell fifteen thousands copies.

Everything is planned. Six months from now the album will be released. Marketing plans are formed, photo shoots are scheduled, and your website is being redesigned. You lay awake at night thinking about the expenses that are adding up, but you trust that enough people will buy the album and see you perform on tour.

Two months before the scheduled release, your marketing agency begins to send out promotional copies to trusted music blogs and media sources. You’re excited to read the response as bloggers give you exposure. A demand for the CD is created, and a few mp3s are given away for people to preview… but that was to be expected.

Then something goes wrong. Someone that received the promotional copy decided to place the album on a Torrent site. Now anyone can download your album for free and you won’t see a single penny.

Though you want people to hear your music, you also want to fulfill the part of your contract that requires you to sell fifteen thousand copies.

Questions flood your mind: When the album is officially released, will people buy it? Or will they download it for free? If you can’t sell enough copies you’ll be required by contract to pay the record label back.

This is the situation that most artists are facing today. As consumers, we seem to feel entitled to have full access to music, and we wince at the thought of paying for it.

Yes, artists are given more exposure when albums hit BitTorrent sites. If the album is loved, album sales reflect this and some of the loss is recouped. Recording and marketing music isn’t free, and music consumers shouldn’t expect it to be.

When you consider the costs that fall onto the shoulders of artists and record labels, it’s understandable why BitTorrent sites are caught in litigation. Today, Oink.cd joined the list of BitTorrent sites that have been shut down.

For this reason Puddlegum encourages you to support the artists by purchasing their music and buying tickets when they bus by your city. We don’t agree with exorbitant prices that are placed on CDs, nor do we support the RIAA. But the list of options to purchase music DRM-free at an affordable price is growing.

Note: This fictional story is not about the business model used in the example. We are not proposing this model as being ideal. There are better models and approaches that embrace the album leak. But the majority of artists take a risk with this established model.

Here are a few DRM-free digital music stores that we support:
7digital
Amazon
eMusic
Insound
iTunes

Peer2Peer networking is alive and strong, in spite of the music industry's attempt to squash them through lawsuits. How P2P affects the music industry has been debated since Napster made their debut, and it appears that new methods of P2P will continue to be devised as others are shut down. A growing P2P system is the BitTorrent which allows people to share entire albums or large video files. Where most P2P networks are full of individual songs and files, BitTorrent is meant for sharing large packets of files.

In 2006 Wiredset teamed up with South by Southwest to provide a torrent of hundreds of mp3s and film previews being featured at the popular convention. Wiredset's interest in the BitTorrent continues as they have now teamed up with Infofilter to chart the top 50 Torrents being shared over the BitTorrent network. The available charts include the Top 50 Anime, Game, Music, Software, TV, and Video Torrents. Each chart shows the current rankings, yesterday's rankings, and the number peers + seeds of the torrent. The charts also provide a link to each torrent.

Wiredset's press release explains:

10/17/06 - Wiredset, the digital marketing agency, announced Tuesday it has added BitTorrent peer-to-peer charts to its Infofilter (TM) marketing intelligence platform and is offering daily tracking updates free to the public.

Wiredset is offering charts of the 50 most-downloaded Anime, Game, Music, Software, Television and Video files distributed over the Internet using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol that allows users to download files from other computers.

"Wiredset's unique charts allow entertainment companies to better understand the reality of media asset trading," said Mark Ghuneim, C.E.O. and founder of Wiredset LLC.

This feature Infofilter marketing intelligence platform can help television networks, film studios, recording artists, record companies and independent producers measure marketplace trends and impact in the important and growing P2P distribution system.

The charts are based on the indexing of more than 30,000 trackers, over 200 individual BitTorrent Web sites and the monitoring of nearly half a million active torrents, Wiredset said.

For more information, visit Infofilter's Web site at www.infofilter.net.