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

[justiceischeap]

25. The funny thing is about pirating music is that artists tend to make most of their money touring

not from record sales. When a band is signed to a label, that label loans them money to record an album. Those costs include studio time, engineers, producers, sometimes session musicians, then you have artists for album art and copywriters for liner "notes." Then you have a mixing engineer for when that album is finished. Then the CEO's have to get their money and lets not forget about the cost of producing each CD and I'm sure I'm leaving lots of things out. So the album then gets released to the masses, where an artist is lucky to get a 7 cent royalty on each sale--because, guess what? The record company needs their loan back first and if an album doesn't sell well, then an artist may never see money from the album sales. So what do they do? They go on tour and sell merch--that is where the real money is made. Yes, pirating cuts into artist profits but not by much--it really does hurt the label more than the artist and that is why label's are trying to stamp out piracy. They couldn't care less about copyright, it's all about recouping their loan to that artist.