Music Piracy: Should Fire Records Lodge Cases or Change Plans?

Recently Fire Records lodged a case against Mag4you and I shared my views on how it should have been done. The following comment is a reply to Fire Record’s comment by a friend, musician & a very loyal visitor of KoolMuzone, Rafey Ansari.

wow, a post from fire records, Hamad you’re famous! heheh but not the kind of fame you might be looking for

firstly, dear Fire, shutting down music sites and arresting people won’t make you a more profitable company. and it DEFINITELY won’t improve the pakistani music industry. sites like koolmuzone are valuable tools that Fire and other labels need to embrace. if it wasn’t for this website, i wouldn’t have gotten so deep into co-VEN, would’ve never have known the existence of numerous new artists, and probably wouldn’t be as interested in the pakistani music industry as i currently am. very, VERY few other sites update as often as this one with current news and views.

What Fire needs to do (in my opinion. i’m not speaking through experience, just from logic) is to embrace ‘piracy’. one needs to look no further than the single biggest success in the pakistani music industry: Coke Studios. they’re providing a quality product and making it readily available for consumption. high quality audio, video, and images made available free for download. they aren’t worried about making money, even though they have a product that has serious cashcow potential. they’re nurturing and growing the cow before they milk it. all they have to do next season is make available lower quality mp3’s available for free download (160kbps or so) and have an optional high quality download (320kbps or whatever) with added goodies for a low price. if you need a western example, look at what trent reznor is doing with the nine inch nails. he puts up an album for 5 bucks a pop, and walks away with 1.5 million dollars or something. and that’s just one man, one band. Fire is a label with the best artists our country has to offer. what an arsenal! oh the possibilities!

anyways, to break it down, here’s what i think Fire should do:

1) Forget about making money off music sales. Main revenue source should be appearances, performances and concerts. Figure out what else you can charge money for, besides the music itself. Lets face it: you can’t download a tshirt.

2) Giving away the music will increase customer loyalty, and once you have customer loyalty on your side, you build your brand power. and brand power naturally leads to value. and high value will let you charge promoters more for live performances, resulting in higher revenue…right?

3) Focusing on live performances also works towards retaining artists who are actually talented and weeding out average musicians and average music. it will push the artist to polish their product and commit more of their time and talent into the label. and this is probably the single most healthiest thing for the pakistani music industry.

4) Promote your website more! I vaguely remember checking it out a whiiile ago, but it wasn’t anything i wanted to return to obviously. i just had a quick peek at it right now but will respond with a more indepth comment once i check it out properly (i’m at work right now).

bottom line, tweak your marketing plan. get connected to your fanbase and give them a reason to find and follow you. jailing their sources of music isn’t the answer.

from a musician, thanks hamad for running this site, hope to have some of my own work up here some day soon, and sorry for the lengthy comment.