this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Whenever I release music myself, I actively block it in Russia, because they relentlessly steal my trance / freeform releases and upload them in warez sites.
Of course geoblocking can be circumvented by a determined pirate but it helps to not be on their radar in first place as a lesser known artist.
As an example, once I released a freeform album. Freeform is a very niche, small scene. It was on Russian forums within a couple of days. Fortunately one of my fans notified me, I had a Russian friend contact the site on my behalf to explain that I'm a poor struggling artist, and they're literally taking money out of my pocket; to my surprise they agreed to take the links down.
Bruh this is piracy community, fuck geoblock
Pirating from massive companies who exploit their workers and customers is different from pirating small indie artists, surely?
Yes it is different in my opinion. If you have a fair and easy way to pay for your product I will buy it.
Exactly. I had a 12 track album up for £9, or single tracks for 99p, don't think that's unreasonable!
They have proven many times over that pirating/accessibility have inverse relationship.
My most frustrating example was when I needed one song for a project my wife was working on a long time ago. I looked to try to purchase it online and could only find it on iTunes. In order to purchase from iTunes you had to download the application and install it. However I had an old machine running Linux... By the time I figured this all out I had spent 2 hours trying to pay $0.99 for one song. I could not find an approved way to do it. So I went the alternative route and had the song in under 5 minutes.
They keep pushing accessibility down recently. I am not playing their games again. When they want to be reasonable they will get paid.
Having a sale price adjusted for local currency would likely go a long way, and I don't mean just a price conversion I mean an adjusted sale price. Some regions 9£ is a lot of money vs their monthly income and others it's not much at all.
Not so much currently (in the case of Russia) as you likely can't sell it there due to sanctions, but in general that would help a lot in boosting sales vs piracy.
I agree. I think people have taken my comment as a defence of the geoblocking, was just offering an example of why someone like a small indie musician may choose to do that. I do find it frustrating when I have to VPN to a different country to watch a video.
But the reason I geoblock one country isn't to be an arsehole, it's because Russia has no recourse for indie musicians like myself who have their music stolen. They have no law preventing music theft which is why it's rampant in that one territory (not saying it doesn't ever happen elsewhere). Pretty much the entire rest of the world has some sort of avenue where I can issue something like a dmca.
Did the sales increase as an effect of them taking it down?
Hard to say really. I'm fairly sure if it was available online for free, less people would have bought it.
When you're talking only £2000 or so of sales for a small indie release, piracy makes a huge hit to sales. My more popular stuff like trance, the sales drop off a cliff the moment it's leaked. There was a huge problem with people on promo lists leaking pre-released tracks to warez sites, not sure if the main labels (eg ones like Armada, Anjuna etc) ever got to the bottom of it, but it really hurt the sales of people who aren't exactly making bank from their music
It can go both ways since a lot of people discover music through piracy too
I guess, I just don't see many people getting something for free then deciding to go buy it out of the goodness of their heart... maybe I'm too pessimistic.
I try not to pirate music production software because I make some small money from my music, and I've personally seen companies go bust and get snapped up by Apple because everyone (me included) justified pirating their small plugins as "they're making lots of money anyway". But I justify pirating shit like Adobe to myself I hate paying a subscription to use software. I dunno maybe more people have this mindset than I realise and are happy to pay after 'trying before buying'.
I'm interested to hear responses from anyone who genuinely buys the music they enjoy after pirating it. Why would they not just buy it in the first place?
They pay if they see you as a person, not just a name on the music.
That'd be pretty hard to do over the internet.
Ah come on you know what I meant.
Got a sample preview of your favorite release?
(Presumably you’re not on Spotify since they’re not paying anything.)
People say this all the time about Spotify, but it's actually a viable outlet for revenue if you're on a decent label who understands how to leverage playlists.
Obv that doesn't apply for freeform... but for styles like trance, techno, DnB etc it's not unheard of for a track to get 500k streams across a variety of playlists, which equates to $1500.
I don't think it would be wise to dox myself here after I've made an unpopular comment!
This is actually one of the less effective examples of geoblocking that someone could ever imagine.
Russian warez sites are only "Russian" because they're run by local admins as pirate sites located in the Global South have tendency to have a longer lifespan and less chances to end their days by being raided than hosted in the Western world. Most part of such sites users / uploaders are from worldwide, for example, if you'll check your active peers for any active rutracker upload, you'll see, that only small part of them have Russian flag. So such geoblocking makes literally zero impact, as it never prevents user from any other country from uploading the tunes to such website.
Also all Russian users are already geoblocked, as they won't buy anything from you (even if they would want to) because most of webservices that you could use to promote your album won't be able to charge their cards due to sanctions. And if some of such users use foreign VPN + credit card combo and are able to use such services, they are not affected by your geoblocking, as they're attached to different region.
stay cheeky breeky friend.
I see what you did there ;)