11 ms·

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

227 points by SuperChihuahua 13y ago

37prime 13y ago
FTA: "After all, fans can't download a concert…” What about live bootleg recordings? But they cannot download the concert experience.
vondur 13y ago
Although not related, Iron Maiden was the first band I ever saw live back in 1984 on the World Slavery tour, Long Beach California. Good to see them taking advantage of tech to decide where to tour. Going after music pirates is a wasteful endeavor.
- r00fus 13y ago
  Some degree of "pirates" are just underserved customers. This is a good business move - especially if the brand is strong. Iron Maiden is a great example, a "thinking man's" metal band that often produced music inspired from famous books (Dune), movies (Where Eagles Dare) poems (Rime of the Ancient Mariner), and tv shows (The Prisoner). Their mascot is very distinguishable.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  They're quite possibly one of the smartest bands. It's mind boggling how much money they saved on their tour in 2008 when Bruce was flying their chartered plane which was converted specifically for the band and its gear. Brilliant move on his part.
Kiro 13y ago
> record stores are suffering from outright theft Is this supposed to be irony?
- 37prime 13y ago
  It would be an irony if it said: ”record companies are suffering from ouright theft"
- acuozzo 13y ago
  Irony Maiden, indeed.
ryan-thompson 13y ago
I couldn't get past the first paragraph. Unsubstantiated propaganda usually doesn't come on this thick without a paid off politician spouting it.
- kristopolous 13y ago
  it's just supposed to be a narrative setup for the content - trying to make the story more substantial. I agree that since the article was just about someone adapting to changing markets, it was kind of an unneeded setup --- but just gloss over it - it's like how in wired articles where they talk about the kind of coffee table and rug the person has.
windsurfer 13y ago
Can anyone explain the phenomenon of in the middle of an article, a seemingly irrelevant sentence appears: "Microsoft in 2013: Big changes, big surprises, and a unifying vision". Why would they put this here? It's not relevant to Iron Maiden at all.
- pcl 13y ago
  It's an ad.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Laremere 13y ago
  Seems to be an inter-site promotion link. If you follow it, it goes to an article on microsoft, which has a link randomly in the middle linking to the Iron Maiden article.
  - windsurfer 13y ago
    I didn't even notice it was a link. On the Microsoft page, they have the text "See Also:" in front. How confusing! I guess I'm not their user.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
suprjami 13y ago
I hope Napster-hating Metallica read this and realise what an enormously stupid mistake they made sending in the layers.
- cs02rm0 13y ago
  Piracy is no trifling matter.
- ballard 13y ago
  Metallicops video: http://youtu.be/mb_jLAisPzk http://youtu.be/mb_jLAisPzk
bananacurve 13y ago
This is an infomercial for a service that monitors piracy.
- drivers99 13y ago
  Yeah. I'm not seeing the connection between the two. I coincidentally just watched Flight 666 a few days ago for the first time, which is about a tour in early 2008. It showed how they get a huge response from fans around the world, but maybe especially South America. There was no indication that they went there as a response to piracy rankings. The article itself doesn't even support the headline.
  - m3mnoch 13y ago
    the relationship between the two is "true fans". where are the true fans? they're where all the piracy is happening. what do true fans pay for? live performances and a chance to connect with the artists. hence, the epic money they're making in a place you wouldn't normally think of as a money-generating location.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
CWuestefeld 13y ago
It's nice that a lot more people like Iron Maiden. But the article doesn't tell us what effect it had on the problem with in-store sales that it laid out in the first paragraph. I happen to think that in-store sales are a red herring, and overall sales are more interesting, but that's not what the introduction laid out. But even total sales aren't cited, just a number of social media friends. I'm also not sure how much we can take from observation of mega-bands like Maiden. I doubt that their experience will translate very well into the long tail of musicians.
- epsylon 13y ago
  > I doubt that their experience will translate very well into the long tail of musicians. Oh I'm sure it does. I certainly wouldn't know as many bands as I know today without piracy - and this translates very much into buying CDs and going to shows, though I can't afford to buy every CD from every band I like. For smaller bands, getting known is the most important. It's what gets them bigger gigs, better labels, better production, better press coverage, better invitations to festivals, better endorsement deals... There's a very strong analogy with start ups there : focus on growth, take VC money, and you'll get the conversion rate sorted out when you're bigger.
  - soci 13y ago
    > focus on growth, take VC money, and you'll get the conversion rate sorted out when you're bigger. Not in the lean-startup movement!
  - paulhauggis 13y ago
    This is true. But now how does a smaller band sustain themselves if they don't want to sign with a major label? It now almost forces them to if they ever want to make a living in music.
- m3mnoch 13y ago
  while not "in-store sales", i think this helps: "The result was massive sellouts. The São Paolo show alone grossed £1.58 million (US$2.58 million) alone." personally, i'm with you. in-store sales are a red herring. for the entire history of music -- aside from the last 60 years or so -- musicians have been paid for performances or on commission. music, my friends, is a service, not a product. and it has been for century upon century. it's really this recent machination created by the recording industry that is the anomaly. music piracy is really just the correction back to the mean.
belorn 13y ago
> Unlike the shift to Amazon that did in the book store chains, record stores are suffering from outright theft, and the migration to iTunes or Spotify streaming isn't making up the difference. Between 2003 and 2009, about one-third of all independent record shops in the U.S. closed their doors So are we talking about physical doors and physical shops selling CD's, or are we talking about online shops, or are we talking about record labels? Each has their own economic model. A physical shops selling CD's is indeed having troubles, but its has verifiable nothing to do with pirates. Second hand shops get constantly bins of CD's, often reselling them for cents. They can barely give the CD away, and selling it as the main source of income is not a hot venture. The few ones that derive some income is those focusing on convenience, like convenience stores, malls, and petrol stations. CD positioned in the same place in a store as other impulse purchases, like candy. Specialized online music shops has to compete with online shops that are more broad in their service. Internet has yet to favor small shops over large brand names. Almost all online shop for electronics also sell cd's, as its extremely cheap to have a catalog over. Last we got record labels. Like with movies and games, publishers tend to be large and few between. There are not 10000 movie publishers in the UK (what I know of). There are not 10000 game publishers. Why should there exist 10000 music publishers? Whats the business model that support such diverse number of publishers?
- res0nat0r 13y ago
  > A physical shops selling CD's is indeed having troubles, but its has verifiable nothing to do with pirates. I'm sure many that still own independent record shops will disagree, including my friend who happens to still work for once which is still surviving. Americans didn't just somehow stop listening to music and buying it around the same time that the mp3 came out in the 1990's because they became enlightened and said "all of this music is crap, I'm not buying it anymore." No, most physical sales have been replaced by piracy and also digital purchases thanks to itunes, amazon mp3 after these stores were finally setup and gained traction, but music sales are overall down and that in part is due to piracy.
  - belorn 13y ago
    If that is true, why can't second hand shop even give away CD's? if its all about price, surely buy 10 for $1 is a should sell out in seconds? Heck, I would not be suprised if some places refused music CD's to be gifted to the store, just because its not worth the space. CD and VHS is sharing the fate of obsolete physical medium. We did not stop watching moves when VHS died, nor did we become enlightened and said "all this films are crap". Nor did we say it when DVDs started to fall, nor should we claim piracy when the doomed VHS store had to switch to DVD, which had to switch to blueray, which had to become a streaming service. > music sales are overall down Fewer people buy a full track compilation CD to get a single good song. Rather than spending $70, they spend $7 and get the song they want, or they spend a monthly fee and get unlimited songs each month. If the overall music sales are down, its because the market has changed. I strongly doubt that the number of individual purchases has gone down at all, and would speculate that it has gone way way up. Feel free to contradict with number of songs sold and listened to by subscribing members, vs number of CD's sold in the 1990s.
briancurtin 13y ago
> Emphasis is now on touring and t-shirts as CD sales dwindle. This has been probably every band's emphasis for years, and for non-mainstream acts, it's not really an emphasis because it's the only way to make it in the first place. Hardcore/punk bands live on t-shirt sales, and CD sales are often break even if even that (I haven't stayed in touch with the friends who are now selling vinyl). Any potential cut from the door (or from bar sales) pays for gas. At the end of the tour, t-shirt profits either pay down your debt from the last record, or go towards booking the next studio session.
- Bahamut 13y ago
  That's because of the crooked contracts that the big 4 labels of the music industry foists onto its artists, making CD sales not a viable profit-making venture for the artists themselves. The tours are the meat and potatoes of income for most artists because of this, unless you go completely independent.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    The crooked contracts in which artists were advanced significant sums of money that they needed to recoup from album sales, which they almost never actually did recoup because the music business is like the venture capital business in that a very few winners pay for a large collection of losers, and so as long as artists were signed to a label and had their albums funded they could afford a middle class lifestyle while producing music full time? Those crooked contracts? It is better, moneywise, to be a record label than it is to be a musician. It's better to be a VC than an entrepreneur. But don't confuse that with the fairness of the deal those people offer. It's better to be a financier than a worker for reasons beyond contracts.
    - robin2 13y ago
      For a different take, read Steve Albini's "The Problem with Music" (http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17) in which he does a financial breakdown of what he considered a representative scenario (back whenever it was written): "The band [...] has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month." Edit: In light of tptacek's third paragraph, perhaps it's more like a variation on the same take.
Dirlewanger 13y ago
Crappy ad article. Plus, this doesn't even explicitly say if Iron Maiden hired the firm and acted on the results. This could be a correlation for all we know and again, just be a crappy ad article.
- smcnally 13y ago
  The article explicitly says the firm arrived at its conclusions from Maiden data it saw. >Musicmetric noticed Iron Maiden's placement and ran its own analytics for the band. The firm wouldn't be the only one capable of drawing such conclusions. I find the piece to be OK and interesting if not exhaustive and airtight.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- eric_the_read 13y ago
  Not sure I'd call Maiden death metal; that's more like, say, Cannibal Corpse. Maiden is pretty much straight up heavy metal.
  - malkia 13y ago
    NWBHM - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_of_British_Heavy_Metal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_of_British_Heavy_Metal
malkia 13y ago
I can't believe I'm reading about Iron Maiden here, since... it's my favourite band ever!
mirkules 13y ago
The gist of this article is that concerts bring in much, much more revenue for the band than in-store cd sales via (a percentage of) ticket sales and merchandising. Most of all, concerts expand the fan base leading to even more revenue. Most of us have been saying this for years (and some in defense of the Napster model, for better or for worse), and it still seems like a no-brainer to me. As one poster here pointed out, if artists treat the music experience as a service instead of product (and, to expand on that, give the music away for free), I would be interested to see the impact. Also note that Iron Maiden has never had a song on the radio and they pride themselves for it, so I don't necessarily buy the argument that artists need the conventional music business model to succeed.
- chc 13y ago
  And if you work at McDonalds 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you'll get more revenue than you probably would as an entry-level developer in many cities. The problem is that it is radically more work and doesn't scale well at all. (You might think this is an unfair comparison, but touring does pretty much demand your whole life. Your effective wage from touring is typically not very high when you consider how many hours it consumes.)
  - alttab 13y ago
    OK, so the entertainers of the future will work differently and make less due to the digitization of music. So instead of being famous and having millions of dollars and a huge tour train, you'll produce music on the cheap or electronically and sell it via you-tube, streaming deals, shows, and direct album sales for the super fans. Innovation always has its side effects good and bad, but those who want to entertain and be famous will still have all the motivation and incentive to be creative and strive for the spotlight. They won't be making off too bad for themselves, either.
    - csallen 13y ago
      Agreed. Just because an industry hit a certain level of profitability doesn't mean it should be guaranteed to do the same indefinitely. If change comes to entertainment than change comes to entertainment.
hyp0 13y ago
piracy is radio
yetanotherphd 13y ago
I know that hn likes to keep original titles but think a more accurate title would be "how iron maiden found the people who buy their albums, and gave them the finger."
dylanhassinger 13y ago
i'm living in Chile right now SO MANY Iron Maiden shirts. its ridiculous
marquis 13y ago
I watched an exclusive live broadcast with a world-famous artist recently in his studio. It was free but I would happily have paid. I see a massive future in virtual concerts, where by limiting access you give exclusivity, and with twitter etc you have immediate access to your audience to feel connected. It was quite special and I hope to see more of it - less touring but more income for musicians is a good, good thing.
dragon1st 13y ago
Never expect Iron Maiden article here in HN, this is absolutely ROCKS!!!
wwweston 13y ago
> Unlike the shift to Amazon that did in the book store chains, record stores are suffering from outright theft, and the migration to iTunes or Spotify streaming isn't making up the difference. This is now false, from what I've read. In the last year or so, recording revenues started rising again. Which means either lots of people started buying CDs again, or revenue gains from digital sales are greater than decreasing sales of physical media. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/technology/music-industry-records-first-revenue-increase-since-1999.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/technology/music-industry-... A lot of people seem to have have looked at the steady decline in sales over the last decade or so and have assumed this means in a digital era, recordings as products are over. The CiteWorld Iron Maiden article hints at it (and the idea that all your act needs to enter this new era is an analytics package like MusicMetric analytics!). Some people are saying this in thread outright. That conclusion is more than a little premature when all we've got to look it is a period which started out with adoption of digital music and the informal sharing/pirate economy getting way out in front of vendors... and then right as they did get onboard and we started to climb past the early birds on the adoption curve, we had the biggest economic crisis since the great depression (which tends take a bite out of disposable income and entertainment spending). (I think there might also be a reactionary phenomenon at work in the tech community: because the content industry freaked out and insisted copyright control and revenues were more important than anything including software/internet freedoms and civil liberties, a lot of tech people seem to decided to fight back by taking the contrary position that copyright control/revenue isn't worth anything at all.)
- astrobe_ 13y ago
  The problem is actually two or three decades old: radio broadcasting and tape recorders initiated it. After the failed attempts to copy-protect CDs, the industry should have acknowledged that fighting piracy is essentially futile, and should have prepared for a transition in their business model. It's not like there were no warning, no signs. When Internet took of, the very first great IP battle was against software piracy. Even an industry that has the technical means to prevent piracy didn't really prevail, why would the music industry win it? Studying the struggles of the software industry could have learned them a lot on what was going to happen, and given them some leads on how to evolve: hardware protection with dongles can be translated in improved goodies and packaging; the shareware (ID Software, anyone?) model can be translated in crowd-founded music like My major company. They could even take a look at what the gaming industry is doing nowadays: subscription and micro-transactions.
tudorconstantin 13y ago
their number of fans increases due to torrents. it's like free publicity. it's like pirating windows - they dont earn right away, but they have a huge mass of people as educated and trained in day by day usage of their products. it is just a shift in the ways to monetize the product
kriro 13y ago
Up the Irons
ndesaulniers 13y ago
Indeed, I came to love Iron Maiden via means of a typical [broke] teenager. Once I had a revenue stream, I collected almost their entire discography on vinyl and had the pleasure of seeing them live in concert twice, one Dream Theater opened (dream concert). It was very exciting to see more and more pedestrians in Iron Maiden T-Shirts as we drew nearer to concert. I invite less familiar readers to watch their Flight 666 documentary on how they've toured all across the world, including countries where the Catholic Church has previously stepped in and banned them (over a song titled Number of the Beast, which is in fact, about doing battle _against_ the devil). Anyways, their music is a treat, and while Bruce can't belt out the same high notes he used to be able to, the sheer musicianship of the band is incredible; virtuosos the whole lot. Up the irons, earth dogs!
toolslive 13y ago
So, the business model for music in the 2000s is the same as the business model for music before 1900. You need to perform live. Anyway, Iron Maiden is a very clever band. Never seen a band with more merchandising. Also, they play games with their fans. This is a nice example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reincarnation_of_Benjamin_Breeg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reincarnation_of_Benjamin_B...
fleclerc 13y ago
I agree it's pointless to fight piracy. I have a friend who took the same approach that Maiden did: when his startup consisted of him and nobody else (he was essentially developing a software at night watching hockey games), his way to fight corruption was to upload his app to all the pirate sites he could find. That helped him get his software into the corporate world (word of mouth) and today he has almost 20 employees and his company recently bought an awesome property near Montréal that was transformed into new offices. While of course not accounting for 100% of his success, I think his strategy was simply brilliant.

227 points by SuperChihuahua 13y ago

FTA: "After all, fans can't download a concert…” What about live bootleg recordings? But they cannot download the concert experience.

vondur 13y ago

Although not related, Iron Maiden was the first band I ever saw live back in 1984 on the World Slavery tour, Long Beach California. Good to see them taking advantage of tech to decide where to tour. Going after music pirates is a wasteful endeavor.

r00fus 13y ago
Some degree of "pirates" are just underserved customers. This is a good business move - especially if the brand is strong. Iron Maiden is a great example, a "thinking man's" metal band that often produced music inspired from famous books (Dune), movies (Where Eagles Dare) poems (Rime of the Ancient Mariner), and tv shows (The Prisoner). Their mascot is very distinguishable.
at-fates-hands 13y ago
They're quite possibly one of the smartest bands. It's mind boggling how much money they saved on their tour in 2008 when Bruce was flying their chartered plane which was converted specifically for the band and its gear. Brilliant move on his part.

Kiro 13y ago

> record stores are suffering from outright theft Is this supposed to be irony?

37prime 13y ago
It would be an irony if it said: ”record companies are suffering from ouright theft"
acuozzo 13y ago
Irony Maiden, indeed.

ryan-thompson 13y ago

I couldn't get past the first paragraph. Unsubstantiated propaganda usually doesn't come on this thick without a paid off politician spouting it.

kristopolous 13y ago
it's just supposed to be a narrative setup for the content - trying to make the story more substantial. I agree that since the article was just about someone adapting to changing markets, it was kind of an unneeded setup --- but just gloss over it - it's like how in wired articles where they talk about the kind of coffee table and rug the person has.

windsurfer 13y ago

Can anyone explain the phenomenon of in the middle of an article, a seemingly irrelevant sentence appears: "Microsoft in 2013: Big changes, big surprises, and a unifying vision". Why would they put this here? It's not relevant to Iron Maiden at all.

pcl 13y ago
It's an ad.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Laremere 13y ago
Seems to be an inter-site promotion link. If you follow it, it goes to an article on microsoft, which has a link randomly in the middle linking to the Iron Maiden article.
- windsurfer 13y ago
  I didn't even notice it was a link. On the Microsoft page, they have the text "See Also:" in front. How confusing! I guess I'm not their user.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

suprjami 13y ago

I hope Napster-hating Metallica read this and realise what an enormously stupid mistake they made sending in the layers.

cs02rm0 13y ago
Piracy is no trifling matter.
ballard 13y ago
Metallicops video: http://youtu.be/mb_jLAisPzk http://youtu.be/mb_jLAisPzk

bananacurve 13y ago

This is an infomercial for a service that monitors piracy.

drivers99 13y ago
Yeah. I'm not seeing the connection between the two. I coincidentally just watched Flight 666 a few days ago for the first time, which is about a tour in early 2008. It showed how they get a huge response from fans around the world, but maybe especially South America. There was no indication that they went there as a response to piracy rankings. The article itself doesn't even support the headline.
- m3mnoch 13y ago
  the relationship between the two is "true fans". where are the true fans? they're where all the piracy is happening. what do true fans pay for? live performances and a chance to connect with the artists. hence, the epic money they're making in a place you wouldn't normally think of as a money-generating location.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

CWuestefeld 13y ago

It's nice that a lot more people like Iron Maiden. But the article doesn't tell us what effect it had on the problem with in-store sales that it laid out in the first paragraph. I happen to think that in-store sales are a red herring, and overall sales are more interesting, but that's not what the introduction laid out. But even total sales aren't cited, just a number of social media friends. I'm also not sure how much we can take from observation of mega-bands like Maiden. I doubt that their experience will translate very well into the long tail of musicians.

epsylon 13y ago
> I doubt that their experience will translate very well into the long tail of musicians. Oh I'm sure it does. I certainly wouldn't know as many bands as I know today without piracy - and this translates very much into buying CDs and going to shows, though I can't afford to buy every CD from every band I like. For smaller bands, getting known is the most important. It's what gets them bigger gigs, better labels, better production, better press coverage, better invitations to festivals, better endorsement deals... There's a very strong analogy with start ups there : focus on growth, take VC money, and you'll get the conversion rate sorted out when you're bigger.
- soci 13y ago
  > focus on growth, take VC money, and you'll get the conversion rate sorted out when you're bigger. Not in the lean-startup movement!
- paulhauggis 13y ago
  This is true. But now how does a smaller band sustain themselves if they don't want to sign with a major label? It now almost forces them to if they ever want to make a living in music.
m3mnoch 13y ago
while not "in-store sales", i think this helps: "The result was massive sellouts. The São Paolo show alone grossed £1.58 million (US$2.58 million) alone." personally, i'm with you. in-store sales are a red herring. for the entire history of music -- aside from the last 60 years or so -- musicians have been paid for performances or on commission. music, my friends, is a service, not a product. and it has been for century upon century. it's really this recent machination created by the recording industry that is the anomaly. music piracy is really just the correction back to the mean.

belorn 13y ago

> Unlike the shift to Amazon that did in the book store chains, record stores are suffering from outright theft, and the migration to iTunes or Spotify streaming isn't making up the difference. Between 2003 and 2009, about one-third of all independent record shops in the U.S. closed their doors So are we talking about physical doors and physical shops selling CD's, or are we talking about online shops, or are we talking about record labels? Each has their own economic model. A physical shops selling CD's is indeed having troubles, but its has verifiable nothing to do with pirates. Second hand shops get constantly bins of CD's, often reselling them for cents. They can barely give the CD away, and selling it as the main source of income is not a hot venture. The few ones that derive some income is those focusing on convenience, like convenience stores, malls, and petrol stations. CD positioned in the same place in a store as other impulse purchases, like candy. Specialized online music shops has to compete with online shops that are more broad in their service. Internet has yet to favor small shops over large brand names. Almost all online shop for electronics also sell cd's, as its extremely cheap to have a catalog over. Last we got record labels. Like with movies and games, publishers tend to be large and few between. There are not 10000 movie publishers in the UK (what I know of). There are not 10000 game publishers. Why should there exist 10000 music publishers? Whats the business model that support such diverse number of publishers?

res0nat0r 13y ago
> A physical shops selling CD's is indeed having troubles, but its has verifiable nothing to do with pirates. I'm sure many that still own independent record shops will disagree, including my friend who happens to still work for once which is still surviving. Americans didn't just somehow stop listening to music and buying it around the same time that the mp3 came out in the 1990's because they became enlightened and said "all of this music is crap, I'm not buying it anymore." No, most physical sales have been replaced by piracy and also digital purchases thanks to itunes, amazon mp3 after these stores were finally setup and gained traction, but music sales are overall down and that in part is due to piracy.
- belorn 13y ago
  If that is true, why can't second hand shop even give away CD's? if its all about price, surely buy 10 for $1 is a should sell out in seconds? Heck, I would not be suprised if some places refused music CD's to be gifted to the store, just because its not worth the space. CD and VHS is sharing the fate of obsolete physical medium. We did not stop watching moves when VHS died, nor did we become enlightened and said "all this films are crap". Nor did we say it when DVDs started to fall, nor should we claim piracy when the doomed VHS store had to switch to DVD, which had to switch to blueray, which had to become a streaming service. > music sales are overall down Fewer people buy a full track compilation CD to get a single good song. Rather than spending $70, they spend $7 and get the song they want, or they spend a monthly fee and get unlimited songs each month. If the overall music sales are down, its because the market has changed. I strongly doubt that the number of individual purchases has gone down at all, and would speculate that it has gone way way up. Feel free to contradict with number of songs sold and listened to by subscribing members, vs number of CD's sold in the 1990s.

briancurtin 13y ago

> Emphasis is now on touring and t-shirts as CD sales dwindle. This has been probably every band's emphasis for years, and for non-mainstream acts, it's not really an emphasis because it's the only way to make it in the first place. Hardcore/punk bands live on t-shirt sales, and CD sales are often break even if even that (I haven't stayed in touch with the friends who are now selling vinyl). Any potential cut from the door (or from bar sales) pays for gas. At the end of the tour, t-shirt profits either pay down your debt from the last record, or go towards booking the next studio session.

Bahamut 13y ago
That's because of the crooked contracts that the big 4 labels of the music industry foists onto its artists, making CD sales not a viable profit-making venture for the artists themselves. The tours are the meat and potatoes of income for most artists because of this, unless you go completely independent.
- tptacek 13y ago
  The crooked contracts in which artists were advanced significant sums of money that they needed to recoup from album sales, which they almost never actually did recoup because the music business is like the venture capital business in that a very few winners pay for a large collection of losers, and so as long as artists were signed to a label and had their albums funded they could afford a middle class lifestyle while producing music full time? Those crooked contracts? It is better, moneywise, to be a record label than it is to be a musician. It's better to be a VC than an entrepreneur. But don't confuse that with the fairness of the deal those people offer. It's better to be a financier than a worker for reasons beyond contracts.
  - robin2 13y ago
    For a different take, read Steve Albini's "The Problem with Music" (http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17) in which he does a financial breakdown of what he considered a representative scenario (back whenever it was written): "The band [...] has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month." Edit: In light of tptacek's third paragraph, perhaps it's more like a variation on the same take.

Dirlewanger 13y ago

Crappy ad article. Plus, this doesn't even explicitly say if Iron Maiden hired the firm and acted on the results. This could be a correlation for all we know and again, just be a crappy ad article.

smcnally 13y ago
The article explicitly says the firm arrived at its conclusions from Maiden data it saw. >Musicmetric noticed Iron Maiden's placement and ran its own analytics for the band. The firm wouldn't be the only one capable of drawing such conclusions. I find the piece to be OK and interesting if not exhaustive and airtight.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

eric_the_read 13y ago
Not sure I'd call Maiden death metal; that's more like, say, Cannibal Corpse. Maiden is pretty much straight up heavy metal.
- malkia 13y ago
  NWBHM - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_of_British_Heavy_Metal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_of_British_Heavy_Metal

malkia 13y ago

I can't believe I'm reading about Iron Maiden here, since... it's my favourite band ever!

mirkules 13y ago

The gist of this article is that concerts bring in much, much more revenue for the band than in-store cd sales via (a percentage of) ticket sales and merchandising. Most of all, concerts expand the fan base leading to even more revenue. Most of us have been saying this for years (and some in defense of the Napster model, for better or for worse), and it still seems like a no-brainer to me. As one poster here pointed out, if artists treat the music experience as a service instead of product (and, to expand on that, give the music away for free), I would be interested to see the impact. Also note that Iron Maiden has never had a song on the radio and they pride themselves for it, so I don't necessarily buy the argument that artists need the conventional music business model to succeed.

chc 13y ago
And if you work at McDonalds 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you'll get more revenue than you probably would as an entry-level developer in many cities. The problem is that it is radically more work and doesn't scale well at all. (You might think this is an unfair comparison, but touring does pretty much demand your whole life. Your effective wage from touring is typically not very high when you consider how many hours it consumes.)
- alttab 13y ago
  OK, so the entertainers of the future will work differently and make less due to the digitization of music. So instead of being famous and having millions of dollars and a huge tour train, you'll produce music on the cheap or electronically and sell it via you-tube, streaming deals, shows, and direct album sales for the super fans. Innovation always has its side effects good and bad, but those who want to entertain and be famous will still have all the motivation and incentive to be creative and strive for the spotlight. They won't be making off too bad for themselves, either.
  - csallen 13y ago
    Agreed. Just because an industry hit a certain level of profitability doesn't mean it should be guaranteed to do the same indefinitely. If change comes to entertainment than change comes to entertainment.

hyp0 13y ago

piracy is radio

yetanotherphd 13y ago

I know that hn likes to keep original titles but think a more accurate title would be "how iron maiden found the people who buy their albums, and gave them the finger."

dylanhassinger 13y ago

i'm living in Chile right now SO MANY Iron Maiden shirts. its ridiculous

marquis 13y ago

I watched an exclusive live broadcast with a world-famous artist recently in his studio. It was free but I would happily have paid. I see a massive future in virtual concerts, where by limiting access you give exclusivity, and with twitter etc you have immediate access to your audience to feel connected. It was quite special and I hope to see more of it - less touring but more income for musicians is a good, good thing.

dragon1st 13y ago

Never expect Iron Maiden article here in HN, this is absolutely ROCKS!!!

wwweston 13y ago

> Unlike the shift to Amazon that did in the book store chains, record stores are suffering from outright theft, and the migration to iTunes or Spotify streaming isn't making up the difference. This is now false, from what I've read. In the last year or so, recording revenues started rising again. Which means either lots of people started buying CDs again, or revenue gains from digital sales are greater than decreasing sales of physical media. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/technology/music-industry-records-first-revenue-increase-since-1999.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/technology/music-industry-... A lot of people seem to have have looked at the steady decline in sales over the last decade or so and have assumed this means in a digital era, recordings as products are over. The CiteWorld Iron Maiden article hints at it (and the idea that all your act needs to enter this new era is an analytics package like MusicMetric analytics!). Some people are saying this in thread outright. That conclusion is more than a little premature when all we've got to look it is a period which started out with adoption of digital music and the informal sharing/pirate economy getting way out in front of vendors... and then right as they did get onboard and we started to climb past the early birds on the adoption curve, we had the biggest economic crisis since the great depression (which tends take a bite out of disposable income and entertainment spending). (I think there might also be a reactionary phenomenon at work in the tech community: because the content industry freaked out and insisted copyright control and revenues were more important than anything including software/internet freedoms and civil liberties, a lot of tech people seem to decided to fight back by taking the contrary position that copyright control/revenue isn't worth anything at all.)

astrobe_ 13y ago
The problem is actually two or three decades old: radio broadcasting and tape recorders initiated it. After the failed attempts to copy-protect CDs, the industry should have acknowledged that fighting piracy is essentially futile, and should have prepared for a transition in their business model. It's not like there were no warning, no signs. When Internet took of, the very first great IP battle was against software piracy. Even an industry that has the technical means to prevent piracy didn't really prevail, why would the music industry win it? Studying the struggles of the software industry could have learned them a lot on what was going to happen, and given them some leads on how to evolve: hardware protection with dongles can be translated in improved goodies and packaging; the shareware (ID Software, anyone?) model can be translated in crowd-founded music like My major company. They could even take a look at what the gaming industry is doing nowadays: subscription and micro-transactions.

tudorconstantin 13y ago

their number of fans increases due to torrents. it's like free publicity. it's like pirating windows - they dont earn right away, but they have a huge mass of people as educated and trained in day by day usage of their products. it is just a shift in the ways to monetize the product

kriro 13y ago

Up the Irons

ndesaulniers 13y ago

Indeed, I came to love Iron Maiden via means of a typical [broke] teenager. Once I had a revenue stream, I collected almost their entire discography on vinyl and had the pleasure of seeing them live in concert twice, one Dream Theater opened (dream concert). It was very exciting to see more and more pedestrians in Iron Maiden T-Shirts as we drew nearer to concert. I invite less familiar readers to watch their Flight 666 documentary on how they've toured all across the world, including countries where the Catholic Church has previously stepped in and banned them (over a song titled Number of the Beast, which is in fact, about doing battle _against_ the devil). Anyways, their music is a treat, and while Bruce can't belt out the same high notes he used to be able to, the sheer musicianship of the band is incredible; virtuosos the whole lot. Up the irons, earth dogs!

toolslive 13y ago

So, the business model for music in the 2000s is the same as the business model for music before 1900. You need to perform live. Anyway, Iron Maiden is a very clever band. Never seen a band with more merchandising. Also, they play games with their fans. This is a nice example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reincarnation_of_Benjamin_Breeg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reincarnation_of_Benjamin_B...

fleclerc 13y ago

I agree it's pointless to fight piracy. I have a friend who took the same approach that Maiden did: when his startup consisted of him and nobody else (he was essentially developing a software at night watching hockey games), his way to fight corruption was to upload his app to all the pirate sites he could find. That helped him get his software into the corporate world (word of mouth) and today he has almost 20 employees and his company recently bought an awesome property near Montréal that was transformed into new offices. While of course not accounting for 100% of his success, I think his strategy was simply brilliant.