Filesharing is Good for Artists
I’ve been saying it for years and it’s becoming more apparent by the day. As record companies start to look at downloading as inescapable, and anti-piracy groups continue to get owned by pirates, one thing becomes clear. File sharing exposes people to material they never would have seen and allows them to try and sample new music, art, literature. Rather that hurting media companies, it may just save them. If they embrace P2P instead of fighting it and alienating their customers.
Yet it has been difficult to quantify the damage supposedly wreaked by downloading. In mid-2007, economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee, from Harvard, and Koleman Strumpf, from the University of Kansas, published the results of their study analyzing the effect of file sharing on retail music sales in the U.S. They found no correlation between the two. “While downloads occur on a vast scale,” they wrote, “most users are likely individuals who in the absence of file sharing would not have bought the music they downloaded.” Another study published around the same time, however, found there was, in fact, a positive impact on retail sales, at least in Canada: University of London researchers Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz reported that the more people downloaded songs from P2P networks, the more CDs they bought. “Roughly half of all P2P tracks were downloaded because individuals wanted to hear songs before buying them or because they wanted to avoid purchasing the whole bundle of songs on the associated CDs, and roughly one-quarter were downloaded because they were not available for purchase.”
This long and fascinating article about piracy and the companies that fight them, shows that media companies, like governments, are fighting a losing battle against what the public wants. The artist are starting to embrace file sharing as this one film maker explains.
A new independent movie called Jerome Bixby’s The Man From Earth showed up on one of the file-sharing sites in November. The film’s producers had no idea it had even been pirated; all they knew was that suddenly its popularity was skyrocketing. Their websites received 23,000 hits in less than two weeks, and the film’s ranking among the most-searched-for movies on the internet movie-tracking site IMDB went from 11,235 to 15. Eric Wilkinson, the film’s co-producer, wrote a fan letter to the site responsible for driving traffic to the pirated film: “Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download…. People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the Net!” He requested that fans buy the DVD as well and added, “In the future, I will not complain about file sharing. you have helped put this little movie on the map!!!! When I make my next picture, I just may upload the movie on the Net myself!”
By the way, I just saw that movie (on a Netflix disc) and I highly recommend it. It’s about a man who claims to be immortal and has lived since caveman times.
Anyway, the future looks brighter for filesharing and dim for DRM and anti-piracy groups. The will of the people is hard to fight. The government needs to get a clue about a lot of similar areas its wasting our money on fighting. There are more important things to spend money on than lost causes.
I just found your article and found it quite interesting. I saw the movie “The Man From Earth” and it gave me goosebumps. The reason was it had many similiarities to the real tory I have been researching for many years.
If you are serious about this subject of immortality, then you will be quite interested in my research and findings on this very topic.
I have summarized what I have found on my main blog: Ben-Abba.com.
Check out the post “Summary of the Facts” when you get a chance and then my follow up book “Secrets of an Immortal - An Eyewitness Account of 2,800 Years of History”.
Posted by Ben Abba on 03/03 at 09:16 PMUh,
Didn’t Jerome Bixby already explore the theme of “The Man From Earth” in an episode of the original Star Trek series?
The episode was called “Requiem for Methusaleh” and featured Captain Kirk falling in love with the brilliant female protege (Rayna) of a man called Flint. Rayna turns out to be an advanced android. Flint reveals himself as an immortal who was by various turns Leonardo da Vinci and other luminaries of history. He left Earth centuries ago and constructed Rayna to keep him company.
Posted by on 03/03 at 11:25 PMYep. This is different, though. It’s basically like a stage play where a professor at a college says he’s moving on so his friends come over to see him off and in the course of them asking him why he’s leaving he tells this story. It all takes place in a living room.
But it’s well written and entertaining.
There are several Star Trek alumni in the movie including the guy who played Worf’s Brother and the guy who play Doctor Flox on Enterprise.
Posted by on 03/04 at 08:55 AM
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