How Iron Maiden found its worst music pirates - then went and played for them

http://www.citeworld.com/consumerization/22803/iron-maiden-musicmetric?page=0

by SuperChihuahua • 13 years ago

227 111 13 years ago

vondur• 13 years ago

Although not related, Iron Maiden was the first band I ever saw live back in 1984 on the World Slavery tour, Long Beach California. Good to see them taking advantage of tech to decide where to tour. Going after music pirates is a wasteful endeavor.

r00fus• 13 years ago

Some degree of "pirates" are just underserved customers. This is a good business move - especially if the brand is strong.

Iron Maiden is a great example, a "thinking man's" metal band that often produced music inspired from famous books (Dune), movies (Where Eagles Dare) poems (Rime of the Ancient Mariner), and tv shows (The Prisoner). Their mascot is very distinguishable.

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

They're quite possibly one of the smartest bands. It's mind boggling how much money they saved on their tour in 2008 when Bruce was flying their chartered plane which was converted specifically for the band and its gear.

Brilliant move on his part.

Kiro• 13 years ago

record stores are suffering from outright theft

Is this supposed to be irony?

37prime2• 13 years ago

It would be an irony if it said:

”record companies are suffering from ouright theft"

acuozzo• 13 years ago

Irony Maiden, indeed.

ryan-thompson• 13 years ago

I couldn't get past the first paragraph. Unsubstantiated propaganda usually doesn't come on this thick without a paid off politician spouting it.

kristopolous• 13 years ago

it's just supposed to be a narrative setup for the content - trying to make the story more substantial.

I agree that since the article was just about someone adapting to changing markets, it was kind of an unneeded setup --- but just gloss over it - it's like how in wired articles where they talk about the kind of coffee table and rug the person has.

windsurfer2• 13 years ago

Can anyone explain the phenomenon of in the middle of an article, a seemingly irrelevant sentence appears: "Microsoft in 2013: Big changes, big surprises, and a unifying vision". Why would they put this here? It's not relevant to Iron Maiden at all.

pcl• 13 years ago

It's an ad.

Laremere• 13 years ago

Seems to be an inter-site promotion link. If you follow it, it goes to an article on microsoft, which has a link randomly in the middle linking to the Iron Maiden article.

windsurfer2• 13 years ago

I didn't even notice it was a link. On the Microsoft page, they have the text "See Also:" in front. How confusing! I guess I'm not their user.

suprjami• 13 years ago

I hope Napster-hating Metallica read this and realise what an enormously stupid mistake they made sending in the layers.

cs02rm0• 13 years ago

Piracy is no trifling matter.

ballard• 13 years ago

Metallicops video: http://youtu.be/mb_jLAisPzk

bananacurve• 13 years ago

This is an infomercial for a service that monitors piracy.

drivers99• 13 years ago

Yeah. I'm not seeing the connection between the two. I coincidentally just watched Flight 666 a few days ago for the first time, which is about a tour in early 2008. It showed how they get a huge response from fans around the world, but maybe especially South America. There was no indication that they went there as a response to piracy rankings. The article itself doesn't even support the headline.

m3mnoch5• 13 years ago

the relationship between the two is "true fans".

where are the true fans? they're where all the piracy is happening. what do true fans pay for? live performances and a chance to connect with the artists. hence, the epic money they're making in a place you wouldn't normally think of as a money-generating location.

CWuestefeld• 13 years ago

It's nice that a lot more people like Iron Maiden. But the article doesn't tell us what effect it had on the problem with in-store sales that it laid out in the first paragraph.

I happen to think that in-store sales are a red herring, and overall sales are more interesting, but that's not what the introduction laid out. But even total sales aren't cited, just a number of social media friends.

I'm also not sure how much we can take from observation of mega-bands like Maiden. I doubt that their experience will translate very well into the long tail of musicians.

epsylon• 13 years ago

I doubt that their experience will translate very well into the long tail of musicians.

Oh I'm sure it does. I certainly wouldn't know as many bands as I know today without piracy - and this translates very much into buying CDs and going to shows, though I can't afford to buy every CD from every band I like.

For smaller bands, getting known is the most important. It's what gets them bigger gigs, better labels, better production, better press coverage, better invitations to festivals, better endorsement deals... There's a very strong analogy with start ups there : focus on growth, take VC money, and you'll get the conversion rate sorted out when you're bigger.

soci• 13 years ago

focus on growth, take VC money, and you'll get the conversion rate sorted out when you're bigger.

Not in the lean-startup movement!

paulhauggis2• 13 years ago

This is true.

But now how does a smaller band sustain themselves if they don't want to sign with a major label? It now almost forces them to if they ever want to make a living in music.

m3mnoch5• 13 years ago

while not "in-store sales", i think this helps: "The result was massive sellouts. The São Paolo show alone grossed £1.58 million (US$2.58 million) alone."

personally, i'm with you. in-store sales are a red herring.

for the entire history of music -- aside from the last 60 years or so -- musicians have been paid for performances or on commission. music, my friends, is a service, not a product. and it has been for century upon century.

it's really this recent machination created by the recording industry that is the anomaly. music piracy is really just the correction back to the mean.

stdbrouw3• 13 years ago

I agree with your conclusion but not your argument.

What does it matter if making a living as a musician through record sales is a historical anomaly? And can you really call it an anomaly if previous generations didn't have the option of selling records as the technology didn't exist? That's like saying "cars are a historically anomalous mode of transport". Great. So?

And by the way, in the early 20th century Broadway made a lot of money from sheet music. A product.

mathattack2• 13 years ago

You notice this in musical traditions too. For a long time, putting your own spin on someone else's tune was considered paying homage, not theft. (You were paying respects, not royalties)

benologist3• 13 years ago

Should we just quit computers because for the entire history of mankind, aside from the last 60 years or so, nobody could become rich from them?

wwweston7• 13 years ago

For the entire history of civilization prior to the 20th century, the tech industry as it's now constituted didn't exist. Computation was a service, not a product, if you will. That doesn't mean the recent state of affairs is an anomaly that needs to be corrected against (though we might turn out to be bad enough at managing our resources that'll happen to some degree).

You're not really talking about a return, though. Under a true return to the previous state, there would be no piracy for the same reason there was no music piracy before recorded music: no recordings to pirate.

What you're talking about instead is still having music be a product, but just one that you expect should apparently always be given away for free.

Personally, I don't see why music can't be both a product and a service that people support by purchase. Piracy (particularly individual piracy) probably should be handled more like the article describes, but that doesn't mean the new norm should be completely free when it comes to recordings.

mathattack2• 13 years ago

I doubt it moved the needle at all. I think their reaction was, "We know they like us enough to steal the music, so let's give them something they can't rip off." I don't think it improved store sales.

belorn3• 13 years ago

Unlike the shift to Amazon that did in the book store chains, record stores are suffering from outright theft, and the migration to iTunes or Spotify streaming isn't making up the difference. Between 2003 and 2009, about one-third of all independent record shops in the U.S. closed their doors

So are we talking about physical doors and physical shops selling CD's, or are we talking about online shops, or are we talking about record labels? Each has their own economic model.

A physical shops selling CD's is indeed having troubles, but its has verifiable nothing to do with pirates. Second hand shops get constantly bins of CD's, often reselling them for cents. They can barely give the CD away, and selling it as the main source of income is not a hot venture. The few ones that derive some income is those focusing on convenience, like convenience stores, malls, and petrol stations. CD positioned in the same place in a store as other impulse purchases, like candy.

Specialized online music shops has to compete with online shops that are more broad in their service. Internet has yet to favor small shops over large brand names. Almost all online shop for electronics also sell cd's, as its extremely cheap to have a catalog over.

Last we got record labels. Like with movies and games, publishers tend to be large and few between. There are not 10000 movie publishers in the UK (what I know of). There are not 10000 game publishers. Why should there exist 10000 music publishers? Whats the business model that support such diverse number of publishers?

res0nat0r2• 13 years ago

A physical shops selling CD's is indeed having troubles, but its has verifiable nothing to do with pirates.

I'm sure many that still own independent record shops will disagree, including my friend who happens to still work for once which is still surviving.

Americans didn't just somehow stop listening to music and buying it around the same time that the mp3 came out in the 1990's because they became enlightened and said "all of this music is crap, I'm not buying it anymore." No, most physical sales have been replaced by piracy and also digital purchases thanks to itunes, amazon mp3 after these stores were finally setup and gained traction, but music sales are overall down and that in part is due to piracy.

belorn3• 13 years ago

If that is true, why can't second hand shop even give away CD's?

if its all about price, surely buy 10 for $1 is a should sell out in seconds? Heck, I would not be suprised if some places refused music CD's to be gifted to the store, just because its not worth the space.

CD and VHS is sharing the fate of obsolete physical medium. We did not stop watching moves when VHS died, nor did we become enlightened and said "all this films are crap". Nor did we say it when DVDs started to fall, nor should we claim piracy when the doomed VHS store had to switch to DVD, which had to switch to blueray, which had to become a streaming service.

music sales are overall down

Fewer people buy a full track compilation CD to get a single good song. Rather than spending $70, they spend $7 and get the song they want, or they spend a monthly fee and get unlimited songs each month.

If the overall music sales are down, its because the market has changed. I strongly doubt that the number of individual purchases has gone down at all, and would speculate that it has gone way way up. Feel free to contradict with number of songs sold and listened to by subscribing members, vs number of CD's sold in the 1990s.

briancurtin• 13 years ago

Emphasis is now on touring and t-shirts as CD sales dwindle.

This has been probably every band's emphasis for years, and for non-mainstream acts, it's not really an emphasis because it's the only way to make it in the first place. Hardcore/punk bands live on t-shirt sales, and CD sales are often break even if even that (I haven't stayed in touch with the friends who are now selling vinyl). Any potential cut from the door (or from bar sales) pays for gas. At the end of the tour, t-shirt profits either pay down your debt from the last record, or go towards booking the next studio session.

Bahamut2• 13 years ago

That's because of the crooked contracts that the big 4 labels of the music industry foists onto its artists, making CD sales not a viable profit-making venture for the artists themselves.

The tours are the meat and potatoes of income for most artists because of this, unless you go completely independent.

tptacek4• 13 years ago

The crooked contracts in which artists were advanced significant sums of money that they needed to recoup from album sales, which they almost never actually did recoup because the music business is like the venture capital business in that a very few winners pay for a large collection of losers, and so as long as artists were signed to a label and had their albums funded they could afford a middle class lifestyle while producing music full time?

Those crooked contracts?

It is better, moneywise, to be a record label than it is to be a musician. It's better to be a VC than an entrepreneur. But don't confuse that with the fairness of the deal those people offer. It's better to be a financier than a worker for reasons beyond contracts.

girvo2• 13 years ago

I only own band t-shirts, no regular ones. Growing up a punk fan kinda made sure of that. Converge, my favourite band of all time make a lot of money solely from merch (and being a label, now).

Dirlewanger• 13 years ago

Crappy ad article. Plus, this doesn't even explicitly say if Iron Maiden hired the firm and acted on the results. This could be a correlation for all we know and again, just be a crappy ad article.

smcnally3• 13 years ago

The article explicitly says the firm arrived at its conclusions from Maiden data it saw.

Musicmetric noticed Iron Maiden's placement and ran its own analytics for the band.

The firm wouldn't be the only one capable of drawing such conclusions.

I find the piece to be OK and interesting if not exhaustive and airtight.

37prime2• 13 years ago

FTA:

"After all, fans can't download a concert…”

What about live bootleg recordings?

But they cannot download the concert experience.

malkia• 13 years ago

I can't believe I'm reading about Iron Maiden here, since... it's my favourite band ever!

mirkules• 13 years ago

The gist of this article is that concerts bring in much, much more revenue for the band than in-store cd sales via (a percentage of) ticket sales and merchandising. Most of all, concerts expand the fan base leading to even more revenue.

Most of us have been saying this for years (and some in defense of the Napster model, for better or for worse), and it still seems like a no-brainer to me. As one poster here pointed out, if artists treat the music experience as a service instead of product (and, to expand on that, give the music away for free), I would be interested to see the impact.

Also note that Iron Maiden has never had a song on the radio and they pride themselves for it, so I don't necessarily buy the argument that artists need the conventional music business model to succeed.

chc2• 13 years ago

And if you work at McDonalds 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you'll get more revenue than you probably would as an entry-level developer in many cities. The problem is that it is radically more work and doesn't scale well at all.

(You might think this is an unfair comparison, but touring does pretty much demand your whole life. Your effective wage from touring is typically not very high when you consider how many hours it consumes.)

alttab• 13 years ago

OK, so the entertainers of the future will work differently and make less due to the digitization of music.

So instead of being famous and having millions of dollars and a huge tour train, you'll produce music on the cheap or electronically and sell it via you-tube, streaming deals, shows, and direct album sales for the super fans.

Innovation always has its side effects good and bad, but those who want to entertain and be famous will still have all the motivation and incentive to be creative and strive for the spotlight. They won't be making off too bad for themselves, either.

Oculus• 13 years ago

I imagine that entertainers enjoy touring/performing vs. viewing it as a chore/work.

Dewie3• 13 years ago

Touring scales by playing bigger venues. Do you know the mean wage per hour for an average artist for their album sale if you divide their profits from the studio time? In theory recording an album can be a fixed amount of up-front labor that then pays out like a passive income, but is that really what happens for all practical purposes?

ndesaulniers2• 13 years ago

Maybe artists should be paid like teachers and teachers should be paid like rock stars.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

The record labels have also noticed this and now nearly every new deal includes cuts of touring and merchandising as well as the usual cut of records sold. They're known as '360 deals'.

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

Not all great songwriters are great performers, or even enjoy performing at all. I'd rather have those spent their time in the studio coming up with new songs, rather than touring with the old ones, crappily, because they have to.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

I've definitely experienced acts which are amazing in the studio, terrible on-stage. I do not speak of autotune-artists. Sometimes it is the fault of the audio engineers at the venue, and sometimes it is synthetic music that was born on a mixing board, rather than on a stool in front of a microphone.

Recoil42• 13 years ago

Most of us have been saying this for years (and some in defense of the Napster model, for better or for worse), and it still seems like a no-brainer to me. As one poster here pointed out, if artists treat the music experience as a service instead of product (and, to expand on that, give the music away for free), I would be interested to see the impact.

Drake/OVO did this with Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd). His first three albums -- House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence -- were all released for free, over the internet.

To say that he's been a success in the R&B world would be an understatement.

dice• 13 years ago

Also note that Iron Maiden has never had a song on the radio

What do you mean by "never had a song on the radio"? They get played all the time on Local Radio Station's metal section.

Here's an example from two days ago: http://bonemetalzone.tumblr.com/post/70661430266/now-playing...

robryan• 13 years ago

I think they just mean that Iron Maiden have never got that saturation level of mainstream radio play that some top pop hits get. At least in Australia they are massively popular among metal fans but in the mainstream they don't have anywhere near the brand awareness as say someone like one direction.

eertami• 13 years ago

Also note that Iron Maiden has never had a song on the radio

That is definitely not true, I have heard with my own ears Iron Maiden playing on UK radio and by looking at logs I can see that at least 8 stations have recently played them.

I think it would be foolish to take pride in not having radio airtime - you get revenue and you get heard.

tokenrove2• 13 years ago

They prided themselves on getting big without radio airplay, which is where I think the OP got confused. I think Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter got radio airplay, for example. They're certainly big enough now, and metal is big enough, that there is actual radio play, but things were different in the early 80s.

collyw2• 13 years ago

They reached number one in the UK a number of times from what I remember in the early 90's. As such they would have been played on the charts radios shows.

chrislgrigg• 13 years ago

I disagree with your idea of the gist of this article. What I took from it was that illegal music downloaders should not be disregarded and we can glean important metrics that artists should consider. This is completely at odds with the opinion commonly held by the music industry. Despite the fact that the article was essentially an advertorial for that product, it's an important example of how we can approach piracy and use it to our advantage.

On the other hand, this attitude is a privilege afforded exclusively to bands with the resources to travel the world, capitalizing on international interest. For an indie band on a small label, record sales are all that matter if they hope to not get dropped.

A band like Iron Maiden has the luxury of not caring as much about recording because they have visibility, they have leverage, they have an existing market, and they already profited directly from "music as a product." Smaller bands, however, only matter when they are doing new things -- releasing albums, specifically -- and the budget for that is the direct result of sales if it is coming from a label. Music as a Service only works when demand is massive. Since most bands are working primarily DIY and taking whatever little budgets they can get, it is not a reasonable model for anyone other than those with existing resources.

jimmaswell• 13 years ago

Iron Maiden's really never on the radio? I thought I'd heard it on the radio before.

hyp0• 13 years ago

piracy is radio

yetanotherphd• 13 years ago

I know that hn likes to keep original titles but think a more accurate title would be "how iron maiden found the people who buy their albums, and gave them the finger."

dylanhassinger• 13 years ago

i'm living in Chile right now

SO MANY Iron Maiden shirts. its ridiculous

marquis• 13 years ago

I watched an exclusive live broadcast with a world-famous artist recently in his studio. It was free but I would happily have paid. I see a massive future in virtual concerts, where by limiting access you give exclusivity, and with twitter etc you have immediate access to your audience to feel connected. It was quite special and I hope to see more of it - less touring but more income for musicians is a good, good thing.

dragon1st• 13 years ago

Never expect Iron Maiden article here in HN, this is absolutely ROCKS!!!

wwweston7• 13 years ago

Unlike the shift to Amazon that did in the book store chains, record stores are suffering from outright theft, and the migration to iTunes or Spotify streaming isn't making up the difference.

This is now false, from what I've read. In the last year or so, recording revenues started rising again. Which means either lots of people started buying CDs again, or revenue gains from digital sales are greater than decreasing sales of physical media.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/technology/music-industry-...

A lot of people seem to have have looked at the steady decline in sales over the last decade or so and have assumed this means in a digital era, recordings as products are over. The CiteWorld Iron Maiden article hints at it (and the idea that all your act needs to enter this new era is an analytics package like MusicMetric analytics!). Some people are saying this in thread outright.

That conclusion is more than a little premature when all we've got to look it is a period which started out with adoption of digital music and the informal sharing/pirate economy getting way out in front of vendors... and then right as they did get onboard and we started to climb past the early birds on the adoption curve, we had the biggest economic crisis since the great depression (which tends take a bite out of disposable income and entertainment spending).

(I think there might also be a reactionary phenomenon at work in the tech community: because the content industry freaked out and insisted copyright control and revenues were more important than anything including software/internet freedoms and civil liberties, a lot of tech people seem to decided to fight back by taking the contrary position that copyright control/revenue isn't worth anything at all.)

astrobe_• 13 years ago

The problem is actually two or three decades old: radio broadcasting and tape recorders initiated it. After the failed attempts to copy-protect CDs, the industry should have acknowledged that fighting piracy is essentially futile, and should have prepared for a transition in their business model.

It's not like there were no warning, no signs. When Internet took of, the very first great IP battle was against software piracy. Even an industry that has the technical means to prevent piracy didn't really prevail, why would the music industry win it? Studying the struggles of the software industry could have learned them a lot on what was going to happen, and given them some leads on how to evolve: hardware protection with dongles can be translated in improved goodies and packaging; the shareware (ID Software, anyone?) model can be translated in crowd-founded music like My major company. They could even take a look at what the gaming industry is doing nowadays: subscription and micro-transactions.

wwweston7• 13 years ago

Fighting piracy isn't what I'm talking about, though, and I think it boosts my last point that you even brought the topic up. It would seem that significant portion of the tech community can't seem to distinguish between the ideas that (a) the norm for recorded music should be that we pay for owning a copy of the recording and (b) we should take an aggressive approach to fighting piracy.

But let's talk about radio broadcasting and tape recorders, because that might actually be an example of where we reached a reasonable equilibrium on this. It was understood that people did use them to get copies of recordings they didn't buy, but everybody learned to live with that, and the norm remained that to legitimately obtain a recording, you bought it.

Software's like that too. Nobody's suggested the time for charging for software of any kind is over, that the end of software development is a service not a product. Some people choose to emphasize services (which is fine), some people choose the product route. Some people do both.

Many who choose the product route do try for some defense against piracy -- it's the lock on the door of your house that you know can be broken with enough effort, but is still a good idea. Everybody knows there's still some piracy anyway, but the norm stays that software publishers can claim the right to have their stuff purchased.

That's what I think we should be going towards for a healthy music industry.

tudorconstantin• 13 years ago

their number of fans increases due to torrents. it's like free publicity. it's like pirating windows - they dont earn right away, but they have a huge mass of people as educated and trained in day by day usage of their products. it is just a shift in the ways to monetize the product

kriro• 13 years ago

Up the Irons

ndesaulniers2• 13 years ago

Indeed, I came to love Iron Maiden via means of a typical [broke] teenager. Once I had a revenue stream, I collected almost their entire discography on vinyl and had the pleasure of seeing them live in concert twice, one Dream Theater opened (dream concert). It was very exciting to see more and more pedestrians in Iron Maiden T-Shirts as we drew nearer to concert.

I invite less familiar readers to watch their Flight 666 documentary on how they've toured all across the world, including countries where the Catholic Church has previously stepped in and banned them (over a song titled Number of the Beast, which is in fact, about doing battle _against_ the devil). Anyways, their music is a treat, and while Bruce can't belt out the same high notes he used to be able to, the sheer musicianship of the band is incredible; virtuosos the whole lot.

Up the irons, earth dogs!

toolslive• 13 years ago

So, the business model for music in the 2000s is the same as the business model for music before 1900. You need to perform live.

Anyway, Iron Maiden is a very clever band. Never seen a band with more merchandising. Also, they play games with their fans. This is a nice example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reincarnation_of_Benjamin_B...

fleclerc• 13 years ago

I agree it's pointless to fight piracy. I have a friend who took the same approach that Maiden did: when his startup consisted of him and nobody else (he was essentially developing a software at night watching hockey games), his way to fight corruption was to upload his app to all the pirate sites he could find. That helped him get his software into the corporate world (word of mouth) and today he has almost 20 employees and his company recently bought an awesome property near Montréal that was transformed into new offices.

While of course not accounting for 100% of his success, I think his strategy was simply brilliant.

How Iron Maiden found its worst music pirates - then went and played for them

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