Fans Come First

from the learning-to-trust dept

jeremiah writes "Independent music artist Scott Andrew has written a nice little piece regarding his views and experience with P2P. My favorite line: 'I love my fans. I worship them.'" Of course, this leads into the important conclusions following that statement: "The first thing on a musician's mind should not be 'how can I keep my music off the P2P networks?' No. The first thing on our minds should be 'how do I keep my fans happy?' followed by 'how do I find more fans to keep happy?' I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that slapping copy-protection on our CDs and making it harder for people to enjoy our music is not keeping our fans happy. Putting copy-protection on a CD is like putting a big sticker on it that reads 'hey, thanks for your money. Oh, by the way, I don't trust you, so I've removed your ability to play this CD in your computer, car or iPod. Enjoy!'" While many new copy protection schemes do allow users to listen to CDs via their computer, car or iPod, the point still remains. Copy protection is an expense for the artist, shows they don't trust the fans who actually bought stuff from them, causes more annoyances for those same paying fans, and does little to nothing towards stopping music from ending up on file sharing systems. So what's the benefit?

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