Last week we wrote about Dan Bull’s experiment to release a song, “Sharing is Caring” for free via The Pirate Bay (and other sites) and to see if he could still get it to show up in various charts. As we discussed, it definitely was making its way onto the lists of Amazon UK’s top hip hop sales. And, on Sunday, the official UK charts came out — with Sharing is Caring coming in at number 9 on the Indie singles chart and number 35 on the RnB singles chart.
In both cases, “Sharing is Caring” was the top new entrant on both of those charts. While some will say that not making the pop charts suggests this was a failure, it sure looks like a ton of folks were happy to support Dan’s effort. As for the US charts, those have a weighted system that includes radio airplay, meaning that there’s simply no way Dan could get listed, because he’s not going to play the payola game to get on the air. Either way, it was a great experiment, and a job well done by Dan.
Earlier this week, we wrote about Dan Bull’s new song and new experiment: could he release a track via The Pirate Bay for free… and still get it onto the music charts? We talked to Dan to see how the process has been so far, and discussed a few other things as well. Dan also mentioned a new carrot that he’s added to the promotion. If you buy all 10 versions of his song he’ll put your name into his next song (and try to make it rhyme with something). You can see him talking about that program here:
Onto our interview:
What are you hoping to accomplish/show with “Sharing is Caring”?
I want to show that it’s possible for musicians to achieve whatever they set their mind on without the need for the protection / interference of record labels and their lobbyists. The BPI, who already helped to force the Digital Economy Act through Parliament during the scrutiny-free wash-up week, are now trying to have The Pirate Bay censored in the United Kingdom. This is a website that does not host any copyrighted material but merely connects people who want to share their own files. It’s also a site that does more for unsigned musicians like myself than the BPI ever have. Of course, on top of this, it’ll be a great personal achievement and hopefully give a boost to my musical career.
What is your opinion on the music charts?
As a young lad I used to listen avidly to the charts every Sunday, and I’d promptly go to the record store and buy the top hits the next day. The charts is a powerful force in influencing young people’s musical purchases. It’s a shame, because the charts are no mark of musicianship or long-term listenability – merely whatever has managed to sell the biggest quantity of copies that week. It’s odd that weekly sales is considered the most important measure by which we judge the success of a piece of music.
What do you think the successful music careers of the future will look like?
The long tail of the music business is going to get longer and fatter. Many more unsigned and niche musicians will find their audiences and be able to support themselves thanks to the way the internet allows them to find a sizeable audience around the globe. The top 1% of musicians might see a dip in sales – perhaps they’ll only be millionaires rather than multi-millionaires. Why is this such a problem?
What’s the reaction to “Sharing is Caring” been so far?
The feedback has been great. People like the idea behind the campaign, and equally importantly they’re enjoying the song. There have been detractors too – someone said “you’re not getting a free song into the charts, you’re selling it. Every other song in the charts is available for free somewhere online.” The difference is that I have published the free download myself and am encouraging people to download it – in hope that it’ll lead to more engagement later. Major label artists who do this (or are even allowed to do this) are few and far between.
I’m not sure how well the single will do in the “official” charts – whatever “official” is supposed to mean – but it’s currently swamping the Amazon hip-hop charts with half of the top selling MP3s being my songs. One of the b-sides is also at number one in the reggae charts – three places above Bob Marley, despite the release of the new documentary film about him.
Are there certain protections you think artists do need? As in, how do you deal with truly bad actors?
I don’t see why creators need special legal protections more than anyone else in society. I was asked yesterday “well what if someone uploaded all your music and claimed it was by them – wouldn’t you want it taken down?”. Well, yes I would want it taken down, but I don’t think there needs to be a law enforcing that to happen. It just means that the person was behaving like a dick and I would make that fact known. It’s too difficult to draw a line between “fair use” and “unfair use”, I believe we’d be better off giving everyone the benefit of the doubt in order to stop mashups and parodies being caught in the crossfire.
Is there still a role for pop stars, or is that going away?
People will always love a pop star to read about and gossip about. They won’t go away any time soon, but as I said before – people are listening to a lot more music. You used to buy a new record every couple of weeks perhaps and not listen to much else. With the advent of services like Spotify, a person might spread their listening time over 50 artists rather than 5. This is probably a far bigger reason than piracy as to why the sales of the biggest artists might be reducing. Listening habits have changed and you can’t legislate against that.
How important have tools like YouTube (and Megaupload?) been to you
in getting your music out?
They’ve been absolutely vital. YouTube is how most of my listeners discover me. I also became a YouTube partner last year which means I can earn money from streams of videos I’ve uploaded. It’s a great place to discover and collaborate with other artists.
The Megaupload takedown damaged my musical career. Supposedly done in the interests of artists like me, what it actually did was turn all the links to free downloads of music, on blogs, review sites etc, into deadlinks. Why was this allowed to happen? I’d love to see Megaupload’s prosecutors explain to me personally how their actions are helping artists such as me.
The idea of the “Top 40” music hit seems like a relic of a different age, and the Billboard best sellers list hasn’t done much to really update with the times. However, reader Will North writes in to point us to a rather interesting experiment being done by the BBC and IBM to basically reinvent the concept of the music chart with a beta test of a new offering called Sound Index.
Rather than just checking on sales at certain shops which (as Will notes in his submission) can be easily gamed, Sound Index tries to look at a variety of online sources to find out what music people are really interested in:
“Crawls some of the biggest music sites on the Internet – Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube – to find out what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web. The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are.”
In other words, they’re reinventing the music charts, but making it much more accurate and relevant. But it doesn’t stop there, either. Rather than assuming there’s just one single chart to rule them all, the system lets you create custom lists for a better understanding of more niche-targeted music. So, say, if you wanted to know who’s hot on YouTube and Last.fm in the indie and punk worlds among US listeners between the ages of 20 and 30, you can create just that list. Or, as per Will’s suggestion, you could find out what female Emo fans between the age of 15 and 20 are talking about on Bebo — and get that list.
It does seem a little limited right now, but it’s definitely a step up from the lists you normally see these days, and shows that niche appeal can actually be worth something these days. That’s a big deal, because the believers in old time copyright insist that with more file sharing and such, only “mass market” music will survive. Instead, the opposite seems to be happening, as it’s easier than ever (often by leveraging such tools) for more targeted niche music to create a modest success by being tremendously successful within its own niche. Tools like Sound Index should make it easier to get even more recognition of success in those niches.