Madonna launches new anti piracy campaign, swears to music pirates

April 22, 2003

If you're a big artist and you need some
publicity, then why not speak out about music pirates? Madonna, still to be
considered one of the main popstars of the world has done this, and she also
took a different approach. While Madonna has done a lot of controversial things,
she now can add another invention. If you download her latest single from file
sharing networks, you might hear her saying: 'What the fuck are you
doing?' By doing this she hopes to remind music pirates that they are not
paying for her music, while they should.

The
record industry blames the phenomenon on online music-sharing for a global
fall in CD sales. Albums by high profile artists often pop up on the net
to download, weeks or even months before their official release
date. Tracks from the forthcoming Radiohead album have already
appeared on the web, even though the album is not due to be in the shops
until June.

One of the tactics used by record labels to
thwart music pirates is to swamp file-sharing networks such as Kazaa with
decoys. In Madonna's case, the fake tracks are being used to send a
blunt message to people trying to get hold of her music for free.
The fakes appear to be full-length songs, so anyone downloading them does
not know they have been tricked until they play the
files.

Other artists and record labels already tried to play the same game, but
if never really worked. On e.g KaZaA
(Sig2Dat) and eDonkey there are
tools available that are able to check if the file is the real song or a decoy
made by the music industry. Read the entire
story here.

Source: BBC