We, along with pretty much every other music-related website this side of the universe, ran a story earlier in the month about Iron Maiden turning piracy of their music into profits. Naturally the Internet went nuts with music pirates touting a big ol' "I told you so" attitude and everyone felt nice and justified. There was even party balloons and stupid hats!
Except it turns out the story was 100% bullshit.
The Spark Notes version of the story was that Iron Maiden was taking the metrics of where their music was pirated and touring there because they knew they'd have a market. The Guardian published the story we were on about and all was well. Except they were drawing the numbers from Musicmetric, whose Head of Public Relations Andrew Teacher is saying the information was generally misperceived and a little misrepresented… and that Iron Maiden wasn't even involved in the entire process. Teacher said:
"We never stated or implied that Iron Maiden had used our analytics to plan its tours.
"[On November 29] The Guardian correctly published Musicmetric data showing the band's BitTorrent and social engagement after the band was named one of the UK's fastest growing companies a London Stock Exchange report. They were far older than many newer names in the report and we wanted to see why Maiden were in there. The data provided an interesting insight, showing just how many fans they'd added through intense touring across emerging markets and highlighting via BitTorrent data precisely where they were popular.
"This is precisely how Musicmetric's analytics are used by artist managers and labels: to see where their artists are popular and what drives that popularity.
"However, the CiteWorld story is sadly not substantiated. It is a follow-up of a Guardian piece and it misrepresents our position by stating that the success was down to use of analytics, which we simply never said nor implied.
"Musicmetric never said Iron Maiden had used its data to plan a tour — we simply said where the band was popular and stated that BitTorrent data generally, could be useful to see precisely where an act is popular."
So all in all piracy is still a crappy thing to do to your artists and just buy the damn music.
