Aslan’s illegal downloading minefield

, , 31 Comments

Aslan raised a few savvy eyebrows last week when they claimed that 25,000 people had downloaded their new covers album Uncase’d through Bittorrent sites in the six weeks since release through their label EMI.

As outlined in a press release, the band had discovered that Uncase’d had performed poorly against their previous albums and after some quick searches on the web, deduced that this is all down to people downloading the album through Bittorrent sites.

Billy McGuinness of Aslan appeared on Pat Kenny and Phantom FM last week to talk about the situation and claimed that as a result of this, along with the the decline of live music and album sales have left the band needing to reassess their future.

What if McGuinness was genuinely mistaken though? Establishing true facts and figures from illegal download sites is a particularly hard thing to quantify at the best of times and it’s easy to get wrong so how did they arrive at such a large number?

In an interview on air with Phantom FM last week, McGuinness said the band collated the total amount from sites like TorrentHub which showed download figures for Uncase’d.

The problem is these figures may not be accurate as outlined by Gambra, a member of the popular alternative music Irish forum Thumped.com. When you do a search for something which does not exist as a torrent on many of these sites, the results page throws up fake torrent links with fake statistics designed to make the owner of that site some easy ad revenue.

The fake results page I looked at as linked to by Gambra show four fake links to download Uncase’d with over 26,000 downloads of these files. Each time, you refresh the page you get different set of random numbers but the files do not exist at all. You can try the same thing with your own name and you’ll get approximately, 25-30,000 “downloads” like I did for files with names like “Niall Byrne.full.rar”.

Searches for real torrents of Uncase’d throw up two real looking ones with a significantly lower share rate than Aslan have come up with (from 2 to 17 seeders, meaning maximum 17 people offering the file at time of writing but there’s no way to tell the exact amount).

Might it be a case that Uncase’d has sold less than expected because we are in recessionary times? Maybe people are being more discerning about their music purchases these days and have decided they don’t need an Aslan covers album?

Digital attempted to contact Aslan but they could not be reached for comment.

No related posts.

 

31 Responses

  3. Derek

    07/24/2009, 11:30 am

    Yes, a great article. But who wrote it? Would it kill you to give your journalists bylines? But I suppose expecting anything more from INM would be asking too much.

  4. Derek

    07/24/2009, 12:30 pm

    Yes, a great article. But who wrote it? Would it kill you to give your journalists bylines? But I suppose expecting anything more from INM would be asking too much.

  6. Derek

    07/24/2009, 11:54 am

    Grear, because it’s a bloody good blog. So long as you get paid for them and get proper credit. Just saying.

  7. Derek

    07/24/2009, 12:54 pm

    Grear, because it’s a bloody good blog. So long as you get paid for them and get proper credit. Just saying.

  8. Nick

    07/24/2009, 12:22 pm

    EMI should have a deal with a company called Big Champagne. Big Champagne have the ability to track and quantify illegal downloads of countless artists, my bet Aslan included.

    I’d suggest Aslan ask ‘em to run a quick report for them. It’s not that hard using BC’s proprietary software and could put these kinds of doubts to rest (although Aslan’s PR company may not want the truth to be told!)

  9. Nick

    07/24/2009, 01:22 pm

    EMI should have a deal with a company called Big Champagne. Big Champagne have the ability to track and quantify illegal downloads of countless artists, my bet Aslan included.

    I’d suggest Aslan ask ‘em to run a quick report for them. It’s not that hard using BC’s proprietary software and could put these kinds of doubts to rest (although Aslan’s PR company may not want the truth to be told!)

  12. hugger

    07/24/2009, 06:56 pm

    I’d wager since the bands highlighting of the so called blight that is illegal downloading that figure has gone to 40k. Sounds similiar to the ridiculous rant made by the Stunning a couple of years back.

  13. hugger

    07/24/2009, 07:56 pm

    I’d wager since the bands highlighting of the so called blight that is illegal downloading that figure has gone to 40k. Sounds similiar to the ridiculous rant made by the Stunning a couple of years back.

  14. Leigh O'Gorman

    07/24/2009, 08:07 pm

    Didn’t the chap from Aslan claim during the interview that a number of the torrents came from a site that doesn’t and has never existed??

  15. Leigh O'Gorman

    07/24/2009, 09:07 pm

    Didn’t the chap from Aslan claim during the interview that a number of the torrents came from a site that doesn’t and has never existed??

  16. Niall Byrne

    07/24/2009, 09:14 pm

    Leigh, the press release mentioned a Torrents Nova which does not exist alright.

    He mentioned TorrentHub on Phantom.

  18. hugger

    07/24/2009, 09:50 pm

    I can’t remember where I read it but it was Steve Wall going off on one about how illegal downloads had cut the sales of their last album in half. He really should have be grateful 3 people thought it worthy enough to still buy it. I loved ‘Paradise In The Picturehouse’ btw. The commonality between all these particular grips from Aslan, the Stunning, Paul Mc(have a fucking)Guinness is that they are old farts unable to grasp the notion of new technology and the opportunity it presents. The music industry is not being destroyed it is being revolutionised (for the better).

  19. hugger

    07/24/2009, 10:50 pm

    I can’t remember where I read it but it was Steve Wall going off on one about how illegal downloads had cut the sales of their last album in half. He really should have be grateful 3 people thought it worthy enough to still buy it. I loved ‘Paradise In The Picturehouse’ btw. The commonality between all these particular grips from Aslan, the Stunning, Paul Mc(have a fucking)Guinness is that they are old farts unable to grasp the notion of new technology and the opportunity it presents. The music industry is not being destroyed it is being revolutionised (for the better).

  20. Barney

    07/26/2009, 01:20 pm

    Maybe all the Aslan fans are kicking back and streaming Uncase’d on Spotify? I’ve just had the misfortune of hearing it there.

  21. Barney

    07/26/2009, 02:20 pm

    Maybe all the Aslan fans are kicking back and streaming Uncase’d on Spotify? I’ve just had the misfortune of hearing it there.

  22. rdlp715

    07/28/2009, 05:19 pm

    26k albums? I don’t think they believe or care about any of this and just want to sound as if they’re in demand. Delusions of grandeur/publicity stunt for flopped album.

  23. rdlp715

    07/28/2009, 06:19 pm

    26k albums? I don’t think they believe or care about any of this and just want to sound as if they’re in demand. Delusions of grandeur/publicity stunt for flopped album.

Leave a Reply

(*) Required, Your email will not be published