The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [70]
Some artists have been converted to the creed. Paulo Coelho, the bestselling author of The Alchemist, claims file sharing boosted sales of his books in Russia by several orders of magnitude. He started a Web site, dubbed “Pirate Coelho,” where he put copies of his work to download for free. “A person who doesn’t share is not only selfish but bitter and alone,” he wrote.
Still, the economic case mustered by the supporters of online theft is slim. Indeed, the evidence so far is fairly unequivocal: offering stuff for free means not making money from it. One analysis of undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that downloading free music reduced students’ annual expenditures on hit albums from $126 to $100, on average. In 2002, other researchers found that peer-to-peer music sharing cut music sales in Europe by 7.8 percent, reducing the chance that somebody would buy music by 30 percent. Yet others concluded that from 1998 to 2002 downloading could have reduced worldwide music sales by a fifth.
The experience of In Rainbows is held as a prime example of what art can do once it is free from the poisonous embrace of copyright, to be shared around the world. Yet these tactics only seem to work for a select group of bands that are already famous.
In 2003, when the RIAA started taking people to court for downloading as little as a handful of songs from a peer-to-peer site, they offered researchers a window into the impact of piracy. Tracking the impact of the decision on music sales, a group of researchers uncovered an interesting pattern of behavior. As expected, file sharing plummeted in the months following the announcement of the labels’ legal campaign, as teenagers freaked that they could wind up in jail.
The interesting finding, however, was that while curtailing piracy had no discernible impact on the sales of top-ranked artists, it provided a significant boost to lesser acts. For albums that debuted on the Billboard charts below the twentieth position, the labels’ legal threat boosted their survival time on the charts from 2.9 weeks to 4.7 weeks. The sales suggested that piracy was particularly harmful to the sales of lesser artists.
From 1996 to 2003, when free file sharing started to decimate music sales, the price of tickets to top rock-and-roll concerts jumped at about five times the rate of inflation—substantially faster than tickets to the theater or sports events. But the evidence suggests touring is not the solution for smaller bands.
The “free” strategy works for Trent Reznor, of the American postindustrial rock project Nine Inch Nails. When he launched Ghosts I-IV in March of 2008, Reznor offered a series of formats, from a $5 digital download to a $300 ultra-deluxe package bundled up with a DVD and other merchandise. He also offered Ghost I, the first part of the album, for free online—putting it up on The Pirate Bay and other file-sharing services. And he licensed the album under a so-called Creative Commons license, an alternative to regular copyright offered by a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that allows creators to reserve some property rights but waive others, granting free access to many users on a noncommercial basis. In the first week, Nine Inch Nails made $1.6 million. And Ghosts I-IV was the bestselling MP3 album sold on Amazon in 2008.
Reznor’s experience, however, also underscores the limits of the strategy for those below the first echelon of pop stardom. On November 1 of 2007, three weeks after the noisy release of In Rainbows , Reznor’s friend Saul Williams tried a similar stunt. He released his album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust!, which Reznor produced and helped bankroll, offering listeners a choice between a free version and a higher-quality one for five dollars. Over the next two months, 154,449 people downloaded the album. But only 28,322, fewer than one in five, paid. A true believer in the transformative power