The Guardian newspaper today has this very pertinent story on the challenge of getting music reviewers’ interest while at the same time preventing pre-release leaks:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/15/illegal-file-sharing-promo-copies
“In the war against albums being illegally uploaded on to the internet before they are released, David Tibet of the underground band Current 93 may have struck a minor, if resounding, victory. “This is a promotional CD,” announces a little girl on the promo copy of Current 93′s new album Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain. “Anyone illegally selling, copying, uploading or downloading this material is condemned to eternal hellfire. Happy listening, God is love.” Then Tibet – a devout Christian with strong views about the impending apocalypse – intones “murder” over a guitar riff heavy enough to terrify Satan. It makes you wonder whether a casual upload is really worth being cast into Hades for.”
I declare an interest – state51, one of the businesses that came together to create Playlouder MSP, works with David Tibet.
When we were putting together the original plan for Playlouder MSP we built a beta ISP partly because we believed strongly that the ISP music bundle was very compelling and felt a retail strategy had chances, but also because we had to demonstrate to two cynical industries that it was possible for the technology to work to deliver consumer friendly services as well as to protect the value of music.
Ironically, while we were the only ISP in the world that was able and willing to identify music being illegally shared, and then intervene to stop it, one of the accounts on our network was used to upload a pre-release copy of an album. We were in beta phase, and were handing out IP addresses dynamically without keeping records, so when we received a notification from the BPI there was nothing we could do, short of the rack and thumbscrews for all our trial account holders, to identify the culprit – even if it happened on the wire rather than on an open wifi.
Even more ironically that transfer would and could have been stopped automatically if the record label involved had supplied us with their music, as it would have gone into our content recognition systems which in those pre-encryption days were reliably catching high 90s percentages of music transfers.
It is a sign of an industry in distress when the relationships between artists and the honoured few who are offered the chance to hear and review new music are so weak that the trust is routinely flouted; and when there is more kudos for upping on waffles than for delivering a thoughtful review. When, where, and how to introduce a work to the public seems like a reasonable privilege to reserve to the creator, even if we recognise that once released other people have many other rights that need to be respected. It is also one of the foundations on which value in music is built.
So respecting the release date is one of the principles we hold to at Playlouder MSP, and we have invested heavily over the years into making sure that as far as possible we can back up that respect with real action. The final irony is that the label itself was the cause of our failure to stop a pre-release leak on our beta network, but that did not stop them circulating some of the correspondence to ISPs we were trying to interest in solutions to help prevent new leaks in future, in an attempt to damage our reputation. My conclusion – if one is needed – is that trust is a conversation built on mutual respect.
