Your view on media piracy. How strongly are you against it?

[Glassunion]

115. You are correct, that most viceral artists do not care about popularity.

I have however found a universal truth that they do like food.

We had no middleman. We produced, printed and distributed the album ourselves. We only sold it at our shows. We never chastised, nor hated them. We were pissed at the situation.

There are two things that always kept me going as an artist.
The first was the creative process. This was the most enjoyable to me. The way the band worked, is that one of us would have an idea, be it a lyric, riff, rhythm, or whatever. Then the rest of us would fill in the rest of the tapestry of the song. We could take four guys, with our own minds, thoughts and emotions of that moment and color a song in a language that (in the whole of the universe) only the four of us were speaking. To me it was cognitive empathy, where I could instantly feel the emotion of my mates, and react or respond in my own way, which they would in turn feed on.

The second was a live performance. This is where we could, on a more limited plain, share in a form of empathy with a crowd. We could impart our emotions on a crowd, where all of us could, by the end of the evening, be breathing with the same breath. We could take them on a journey, from despair or anger, to elation and joy. We could share ourselves, from our humble insecurities to visceral anger.

Popularity was not our goal. If we wanted to be popular we would have printed more than 3,000 copies of our album. We had occasionally opened for bigger names, on mid-week shows with 6,000+ people to play for. But we were a club-level band, so our "put food on the table" money was not from the performance, it was in merchandise and CDs. Yes it was a risk producing an album, but in the wild west days of the early internet and file sharing I would say that had a huge hand in our predicament. This in the end had a direct effect on our ability to produce another album. So the unfortunate side effect was that it stifled the creation.

In today's day and age, I feel that we would have had a nice break even with the ability for folks to buy single songs from the services (iTunes, Pandora, etc...) that popped up in the past several years.