US rock band The Red Hot Chili Peppers have hit out at a music “pirate” who leaked their new album, Stadium Arcadium, onto the internet.
Bass player Michael “Flea” Balzary said the group would be heartbroken if fans downloaded it illegally before its official release.
Stadium Arcadium, the band’s first studio album in four years, is due to go on sale next week.
A spokeswoman for the band said she did not know who leaked the album.
‘Poor quality’
In a letter on the band’s website, Flea wrote: “For people to just steal a poor sound quality version of it for free because some **** stole it and put it on the internet is sad to me.
“I cannot put in words how much this record means to us, how sacred the sound of it is to us, and how many sleepless nights and hardworking days we all had thinking about how to make it be the best sounding thing we could.
“Now for someone to take it and put it out there with this poor sound quality it is a painful pill for us to swallow.”
The Rolling Stones, Coldplay, Radiohead, Oasis and U2 are among the other stars who have fallen victim to internet leaks.
Falling CD sales have been blamed on piracy but an industry campaign to prosecute illegal uploaders has struggled to contain the problem.
In the US, people who copy music and films before their official release date face up to 11 years in prison under the 2005 Family Entertainment and Copyright Act.
Damn! To think that the album is out on filesharing networks even before it’s actually released….these pirates work really fast!
Now, I have been thinking. No doubt the members of the band are really mad, but here is some consolation, well, in a twisted way at least.
A lot of people who download music illegally over the internet, never actually have the intention of buying the original records. They download it because it’s there, and it costs them nothing but bandwidth. Now, I am not saying that’s the case with everyone, but I think we can safely assume that most people think that way when they pirate music, software etc.
I’ll give you an example. I’ve got friends who are living in US. When one of them had come to India, he was surprised to find that DVDs of all the latest movies are available here (pirated of course) for as low as 99/- ($2.20). He bought some movies like ‘For a few dollars more’, ‘Enter the dragon’ etc. Now this guy is a huge Star Wars fan, and there were Star Wars DVDs available for the same price. But he never bought them.
He went back to US and bought the whole set of DVDs for something like $70 (3,140.20/-). He could have easily bought the set for about 500/- ($11.14), but he didn’t, because he says he is loyal Star Wars fan and wouldn’t mind spending as much money on DVDs.
And that makes sense, to me at least. While I am not supporting piracy at all, I am just looking away from the legal and moral aspects of it.
It’s like I wouldn’t ever go the theatre and watch Uwe Boll’s masterpiece ‘Alone in the dark’, but give me a chance to download the movie and check out how bad it actually is; I might just. And frankly, in this case, Uwe Boll shouldn’t be complaining. The fact that someone is watching his movie, pirated as it maybe, should make the man very happy.
But without going off on a tangent here, I’ll just say that while piracy is very much illegal and it costs a lot of money to the industry, I don’t think it’s as bad as it’s made out to be, for a simple reason that most pirates out there never have any intention of buying legitimate material in the first place.
Sure it’s twisted and might sound really stupid, but it’s true.
First published on GameSpot