Interesting article Damien, I picked up on a couple of paragraphs..
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Heap remortgaged her flat to set up her own record label and release her second album, Speak for Yourself, in 2005. The follow-up, Ellipse, reached number five in the US chart last year.
During our conversation, she is keen to look on the bright side and not appear to moan. But she does point to several factors that have made life tough as a working musician.
First, the slide in record sales in recent years has left a noticeable dent in her bank balance.
"Even though the popularity and the fanbase is much much greater, and more people have heard about me through things like the Grammys and the Ivors and touring and word of mouth, it doesn't reflect in he sales of the record and doesn't go into my pocket."
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Independent artist, own label, so no cruel mega-corporation stealing all her money from her record sales. You'd expect all those honourable downloaders and uploaders who do what they do to punish big music while paying for masses of content they actually do like, more content apparently than those who don't download it, to really enjoy her critically acclaimed work and reward her appropriately for it, especially given it's available online without DRM.
Yet a search for her name and the word 'torrent'..
About 90,300 results (0.69 seconds)
121 results on a well known Usenet search engine. This from an artist whose records aren't really super recent, isn't 'mainstream' and should be exactly the sort of artist the sanctimonious leechers pontificate about deserving support when they 'stick it to the man' by downloading mainstream content.
EDIT: Lovely comment from the uploader of one of the torrents.
Quote:
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This is the full album. She leaked it herself inadvertantly when she posted the album in a streaming format, but didn't realize you can just right click and download each track if you have Real Player haha
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So she did everything right down to making her music available free to stream, but it doesn't appear to be doing anything to translate to sales. It did however translate to illicit downloads.
Thoughts?