Here’s some advice for Kanye West: If you can’t beat music pirates, play to them.
The rapper’s latest album, “The Life of Pablo,” was illegally downloaded more than half a million times within 24 hours of its Feb. 14 release — costing him as much as $10 million in record sales. Music piracy continues to cost US artists an estimated $20 billion a year.
But one marketing firm believes that bad pirates can be converted into good ones. Muzit is pushing a fan-friendly alternative to the anti-piracy efforts of the major record labels, which for years have tried suing music pirates into submission.
“The litigation model to end piracy just hasn’t worked,” said Muzit Chief Executive Tommy Funderburk, noting that illegal peer-to-peer file sharing continues to dwarf legitimate track sales by a factor of 20 to 1. “So we flipped the model upside down and, instead of considering pirates as foes, started treating them as fans.”
Muzit sees pirates as potential customers who might be willing to pony up for concert tickets, contests and merchandise — if not the music itself — when approached directly.
But tapping this customer base requires knowing where they are. Muzit has introduced a geo-location map, which it calls a TRACE Marketing Platform, short for Torrent Reporting and Content Engine.
TRACE tracks peer-to-peer file sharing in real time, keeps a running tally of downloads by artist and maps the location of those pirating an artist’s file down to the zip code.
As an example, Funderburk put TRACE to work on downloads of West’s most recent album, identifying piracy hot spots in Chicago, Texas and on the coasts.
‘The litigation model to end piracy just hasn’t worked…’
- Tommy Funderburk, Muzit CEO
For its small but growing roster, which includes The Mavericks and Richie Sambora, as well as the estates of James Brown and Isaac Hayes, Muzit uses TRACE to schedule tour stops where the client has large clusters of nonpaying fans. Muzit also collects IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of a client’s most active P2P file sharers and sends e-mails directly to them.
The company has amassed 250 million of these addresses, Funderburk said, and reaches out to select samples with notices of music, ticket and merchandise opportunities.
A “Godfather of Soul” pirate might receive an unheard cut from the Brown catalog, while a Sambora downloader might be invited to an end-of-tour raffle for the rocker’s guitar.
The company said such overtures are converting practicing pirates into legitimate customers at a 2-to-14 percent rate, depending on the program put together for any one artist.
But as a musician himself (he has sung and written for Airplay, Boston and others), Funderburk said the real thrill was bringing fans together with artists they like so much they’ve stolen not just from them but for them.