At a music industry conference he recently spoke at, Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, was recently asked how to stop music piracy. Here is what he said:

“More people are killed by pigs than sharks each year, but because shark attacks are more newsworthy, they seem more prevalent. Piracy gets all the attention, but … obscurity is your real enemy. Fight obscurity until you’re a household name, then piracy will be more of a problem than obscurity. Until then, worry about pigs, not sharks.”

The audience, full of record label execs, really didn’t like this answer. That’s too bad, because they are forgetting one very important detail: They are the ones with the problem! While on the other hand, CD Baby is doing better than ever. In fact, their physical CD sales are up 30% over last year, while CD sales in the industry as a whole are going down significantly. So, if you were one of these troubled execs in the audience, would you be paying attention to Derek’s lesson or would you be shouting “I hate your point of view, buddy!” like one woman did? Wow.

Derek concludes, “Putting so much attention and energy into fighting piracy (as if, when solved, you’ll suddenly start selling 10 times more) - is misguided effort, distracting you from what you really need to be improving.” That sounds just like what I told Stefan Herwig, but he didn’t get it either.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Marketing and Promotion, Music Industry News, Record Labels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.