If you pirate music, you're downloading communism!

[SHLL (Scott Heller)]

 This is a tough subject. Now that I run my own band I can see this in a slightly different light. What we have been doing is giving away high quality MP3 versions of all our jam sessions for free on our web site. We also have all our live concerts recorded and put up on the internet at www.archive.org for free. We do not have any of the tracks from our CDs on our main web site and hope to encourage people to buy our cds and sonn vinyl records! We do put tracks from our cds on myspace, but I think myspace has not lead to a lot of new fans for us. Fans that buy our music. 

As for illegal downloading, it is something we have to live with as our music lives in a digital world. If you release stuff only on cassette and vinyl, you will have a lot less problems with this as it is more effort for some one to digitize your stuff and put it up. It will of course happen.

Our new CD came out last week in Feb and just a week ago, there was already a site : www.omega-music.com (I think) and they had the whole thing up for free download... What can you do???

Our record label tries to write to these people but if they don't want to do anything, little can be done from a small label. 

Lucky we do not have to live off music. I am just happy that we can get the whole thing to more or less go around and we can still afford to put out 1-2 cds a year...

As long as we release music in a digital format, we will live with the problem of people getting our work for free.

Scott

www.oresundspacecollective.com
www.myspace.com/oresundspacecollective