We recently noted that, in the same week that Dan Bull had his new single hit the music charts because he promoted it via The Pirate Bay, BPI had convinced a court to order UK ISPs to start blocking TPB. Earlier this year, Dan had already written a song, Bye, Bye BPI, for that organization's initial attempt to block The Pirate Bay, and we asked Dan to share his thoughts on TPB officially being blocked in the UK.

The Pirate Bay would seem an odd primary target for the British record industry's hit list. After all, it doesn't host any infringing content, but serves as a hub for people who want to share their own files directly. Sites like YouTube receive stratospherically higher amounts of traffic, and host hundreds of thousands of infringing videos. Perhaps it is not the infringement itself then, but The Pirate Bay's notoriously defiant defense of its modus operandi that has made it a target. Or maybe it's an underlying acknowledgement that to prevent infringement in any meaningful way would require the impossible feat of blocking every site on the internet that contains a hyperlink.

Despite the industry's readiness to insist that copyright infringement threatens the future of musicians - especially those who are lesser known - there are plenty of examples where the opposite is true. In fact, every musician I know utilizes filesharing in some form or another. Let me tell you how filesharing has allowed me to turn my creative ambitions into something real.

I use a program called Cubase to compose my music. Initially I bought a legitimate copy for several hundred pounds. It was buggy and regularly crashed. Eventually it stopped working altogether. Rather than buying a replacement, I downloaded a cracked version via The Pirate Bay. It was far more stable. I also downloaded some industry standard plugins which would have cost thousands of pounds. I was unemployed, so the choice wasn't between downloading or purchasing. It was between downloading or nothing.

Using this cracked software I produced an album about overcoming self-destructive thoughts and coping with Asperger syndrome. A while after publishing the album I was contacted by a young man who I'll call Rupert. Rupert suffered the same problems, and was preparing to take his own life. After listening to the album, he realized that he wasn't alone, and chose to face his problems. This music, he said, saved his life. If the British Phonographic Industry had gotten their way sooner, my album wouldn't exist, Rupert wouldn't have heard it, and perhaps his story might have taken a turn for the worse.

Another example of how filesharing and creativity go hand in hand is The Promo Bay - The Pirate Bay's launchpad for unsigned artists. Thousands of musicians have applied, eager for their work to be given the spotlight that traditional, industry-sanctioned channels will never allow. Now, thanks to the High Court ruling, no aspiring musician will be able to use The Promo Bay to gain exposure in the UK. Once again, the British Phonographic Industry is throttling any channel of distribution which doesn't allow them the cut to which they believe they are entitled. I'd like to see what the BPI's head, Geoff Taylor, has to say to George Barnett, the unsigned British songwriter whose fanbase skyrocketed after being featured on The Promo Bay. The only thing that the BPI has done for George is to entirely prohibit his primary means of exposure. A few months ago I asked The Pirate Bay if I could help to manage The Promo Bay for them. They reluctantly refused, telling me that if I worked with them in any official capacity, I may be regarded as a co-conspirator, meaning that if I ever wanted to visit the USA I could be detained on criminal charges. Yes - helping to promote unsigned music on a popular website meant that I could be kept prisoner in a foreign country for supposedly conspiring to help kill the music industry. If ridiculous situations like the above are allowed to happen, then perhaps killing the music industry wouldn't be such a bad thing...

Having said that, it's laughably easy to circumvent the block enforced by the courts; it takes a single click. This is as difficult as it will ever be, unless the internet is policed and regulated so much that it ceases to function at all. Preventing internet filesharing is impossible because - quite simply - the internet IS filesharing.

We recently wrote about Paulo Coelho convincing his publisher, Harper Collins, to run an experiment, in which they offered up nearly all of his ebooks for just $0.99 (the one exception being his most famous book, The Alchemist). In the comments, we had an interesting discussion, in which someone suggested that even dropping the price by 90% would mean it was unlikely that he got 10x more sales to make up the difference. Others pointed to similar experiments -- such as those by Valve, in which dropping prices by large amounts increased sales by much, much larger percentages.

Paulo himself contacted us to share some of the initial results -- pointing out that, according to Amazon, the sales of a bunch of his books increased between about 4,000% and 6,500%. Yes, that's multi-thousands of percent increases. I would think that more than made up for the difference in price... While the screenshot just shows the top books, he noted that a similar pattern was seen on basically all of his books.

One hopes that this will send book publishers running to their nearest economics text or professor, so that they can be taught about price elasticity, and why lowering prices can often make you more money.

Following the massive success of her Kickstarter experiment, we asked Amanda Palmer if she wanted to write a quick guest post about why she thought the offering was so successful. Here's what came back, including a bonus bit from Sean Francis, who has helped Amanda for years on the tech/social side of things.

There's a great story about how bamboo grows. A farmer plants a bamboo shoot underground, and waters and tends it for about three years. Nothing grows that's visible, but the farmer trots out there, tending to this invisible thing with a certain amount of faith that things are going to work out. When the bamboo finally appears above ground, it can shoot up to thirty feet in a month. This is like my kickstarter campaign. The numbers aren't shocking to me, not at all. I set the goal for the kickstarter at $100,000 hoping we'd make it quickly, and hoping we'd surpass it by a long-shot.

I've been tending this bamboo forest of fans for years and years, ever since leaving roadrunner records in 2009. Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that i curiously follow, every strange bed I've crashed on...all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY. Asking my poor fans to give a dollar, or if nothing else, to spread the link; asking my rich fans to loan me money at whatever level they can afford to miss it for a while.

And they help because they know I'm good for it. Because they KNOW me.

I've seen people complaining that this is easy for me to do because I got my start on a major label. It's totally true that the label helped me and my band get known. But after that, the future was up to me. It bought me nothing but a headstart, and I used it. I could have stopped working hard and connecting in 2009. If I'd done that, and then popped up out of nowhere in 2012 to kickstart a solo record in 2012, my album would probably get funded to the tune of $10k...if I was lucky. There are huge ex-major label artists (pointless to name names) who have tried the crowd-funding method and failed dramatically, mostly because they didn't have the online relationship with their fans to rely on. And vice versa: plenty of young upstarts with a small but devoted fanbase have kicked ass using crowdfunding, because they've taken a hands-on approach online and at shows, and have been close and connected with their fans ALL THIS TIME, while nobody was caring or watching.

I tweet all day. I share my life. My REAL life. The ugly things, the hard things. I monitor my blog religiously. I read the comments. I ask for advice. I answer questions. I fix problems. I take fans at their word when they see me at a show and tell me their vinyl arrived broken in the mail. I don't try to hide behind a veil of fame. I don't want to be anything more than totally human. I make mistakes, get called out, and apologize. I share my process. I ask for help SHAMELESSLY. I sleep at my fans houses. I eat with them. I read the books they write. I see their plays and dance performances, online and in real life. I back their own crowdfunding projects. I get rides home with them. I'm the kind of person they WANT to help, because they know me well enough, after years of connecting, to know WHO I ACTUALLY AM. They don't just get a photoshopped snapshot of my every time I have an album to promote. They see the three-dimensional person, in motion, in real-time. Living and working.

There is no marketing trick. There is human connection, and you can't fake it. It takes time and effort and, most importantly: you have to actually LIKE it, otherwise you'll be miserable.

We're entering the era of the social artist. It's getting increasingly harder to hide in a garret and lower your songs down in a bucket to the crowd waiting below, wrapped in a cloak of sexy mystery above. That was the 90s. Where an artist could be as anti-social as they wanted, and rack up cred left and right for shoe-gazing and detaching. It's over. The ivory tower of the mysterious artist has crumbled. If you're painfully shy and antisocial and hate tweeting and blogging and connecting and touring...and you really just want to write and sing music and be left alone, you can still succeed...if your music is BRILLIANT. But you better have a damn clever boyfriend, girlfriend or friend-manager to fight your battle for you and lift the megaphone in your name, because no longer will a huge, magical company scoop you up and do all the heavy lifting (or if they do, they'll charge you 100% of your income for the service).

I got asked today on Twitter: "why is an artist your size using kickstarter? shouldn't you leave crowdfunding to the peple who need it?"

I answered: all artists at every level (even the Gagas and Madonnas) have to somehow raise capital for their work, whatEVER level it's at. some artists go to labels/companies for the capital to fund albums & tours. Now artists (at any level) can go direct to their fans. The end.

The basic tenets of success in music are still true: have good songs, touch people, work hard. But as far as getting around from place to place... musicians are no longer traveling by limo with one-way glass protecting them from view. Now we're all going on foot, door to door, in the open sunshine... with the internet as our magical, time-space defeating sidewalk.

love,
amanda
@amandapalmer

ALSO:

Here's is a note from Sean Francis (@indecisean) , who's been working with me behind the scenes for over 5 years, helping me run my blog, socials, mailing list and general net-land:

The internet's been synonymous to Wild West'ian outlaws and lawlessness for so long, I think people forget that it's also got another REALLY appealing attribute: it's a giant safety net. And if you spend time nurturing and engaging the people holding that net, you KNOW you're going to get caught.

For several years, I've watched and aided, as Amanda's interwoven strategies predicated on those two things - pioneering and connection.

As new media has emerged, we've looked at how it'd be advantageous to her career, and in what ways it could be potentially beneficial to the fanbase... and as she's toured, written, recorded, and Twitter'd away, we were privately (and sometimes publicly) playing with puzzle pieces which are culminating in the release of this new album.

To get this right, Team AFP have spent hours on the phone and sent literally hundreds of emails, every week (sometimes daily)…and with the launch of our Kickstarter this past Monday, the public is seeing what several years of work can do.

When Amanda fell or misstepped in the process of trying to get this right, her net was there. And now that she's ready to do this on her terms, they still are.

Maybe it's a small collection of fans in some people's eyes - but it's a SOLID one - that believe in art and connection. And I'm watching it grow in size by the minute... not just monetarily, either.

While you were sleeping, Amanda Palmer built an army.