A Great Way to Alienate Your Potential Fans
October 3rd, 2008
The Doddfather here at Brains on Fire sent around a link today that talks about how a Hollywood director tried to outsmart the torrent sites. (Here is the correct definition of a torrent site, submitted by Dave in the comment section: .torrent files are small files that give special software installed on the user’s computer (the client) to identify a specific file or group of files. it can then connect to the torrent site (tracker) to find people with the same files and download them from other users who have them.)
Apparently Darren Bousman, director of the new movie Repo! the Genetic Opera convinced his own fans to “attack” users on the Torrent sites. First they had a plan to upload fake albums and tag it with the Repo! title (a la Madonna and others back in the original Napster days). When that didn’t work because of the negative comments they were getting on the download site, the “fans” decided to flood the comments with positive comments. That didn’t work either as the negative soon outweighed the positive. Now they’ve resorted to trying to say real copies of the album on the sites have a virus. Sheesh.
The point? Look, I know it’s important to protect your intellectual property. And I commend Bousman for using his fans as his weapons. But there are some things you just can’t stop. And ultimately, in the name of piracy you just might end up ticking off a whole bunch of people who could have seen your movie or heard your music and turned into an evangelist, therefore potentially making you a lot more money.
The other thing is that you have a choice to make. You can spend your time, money and creative energy trying to stop the title wave or you can embrace it and use it to your advantage a la Radiohead and others. It’s your choice.
Make no mistake about it - I’m not advocating ripping people off or stealing intellectual property. I’m just saying that the people who will win are the embracers. The ones who look at things completely differently. The ones who take what might be considered wrong and use it for making things right.
UPDATE: TorrentFreak has an interview with Bousman up. The big news is that he’s asked the “Repo army” to lay off.
Other posts by Spike.
Stephen Denny says:
Spike: didn’t the Radiohead thing, when all was said and done, turn out to be a bit of a bust? I picked up somewhere that they made virtually nothing (unless I’m remembering it wrong) - so correct me if you know otherwise.
I applaud content owners’ actions to protect their work, coming from a family that lived off of music, writing and film. But bandwidth and digital decryption make it pretty hard.
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:29 pmenigmax says:
Hi
I’m the writer of the original article. The WSJ article link (under ’sent around a link’) appears to go to an unrelated article.
Our article can be found here
http://torrentfreak.com/saw-director-recruits-army-to-post-fake-torrents-081002/
and later today we will publish an interview with Darren Bousman
Many thanks
October 4th, 2008 at 12:46 amSpike says:
Stephen,
Rumor has it that Radiohead got, on average, $10 per download. Here’s the Wikipedia downlow: “The download’s commercial success is unclear, as the band declined to publicize their Internet sales numbers. Upon its retail release, however, In Rainbows entered the UK Album Chart and the U.S. Billboard 200 at number one. The album earned widespread critical acclaim, and was ranked as one of the best albums of 2007 by several publications.”
enigmax: I’ve made the change in the link. Sorry about that, took many open links at once! I’ll look for the interview. And thanks for chiming in.
October 4th, 2008 at 11:20 amMelle says:
In regards to how much Radiohead made from their strategy, it was in the millions. Here is a good article that used logic to estimate…
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/10/estimates-radio.html
October 5th, 2008 at 7:38 amDave says:
Your basic description of torrent sites is wrong - Torrent sites are sites that allow people to upload .torrent files.
.torrent files are small files that give special software installed on the user’s computer (the client) to identify a specific file or group of files. it can then connect to the torrent site (tracker) to find people with the same files and download them from other users who have them (not downloading them from the site at all) - while this distinction may have been too wordy for your blog post, it’s an important difference upon which the legality of every torrent site in the world hinges.
It would probably have been preferable to not attempt to explain what such sites do at all, rather than post your simplistic and wholly incorrect description.
October 6th, 2008 at 9:25 amSpike says:
Thanks for the slap on the wrist, Dave. I guess it’s obvious I don’t use torrent sites. Thanks for the correction - I’ll make it in the post.
October 6th, 2008 at 9:44 am