Business - Written Tuesday, June 17, 2008 by Denis Hancock - 1 Comment

Let’s use the pirate tax… to fund a pirate album

Here’s an interesting little story from TorrentFreak – when Mr. Suitcase published an album last year, he started receiving payments from Stim (the Swedish Performing Rights Society), which is funded via a tax on all recordable media in Sweden. This is often referred to as the “Pirate Tax”, as it is designed to compensate artists for having their creative output “stolen” in various ways. To quote Mr. Suitcase on how he responded:

“First, I got a bit put off by receiving the money because to me, that kind of arbitrary hand-out of alms is a ridiculous system. Then I thought, why not see it as an opportunity and earmark the money for something creative. And since the money came from piracy, I had to use it for more piracy, right?”

So he created a new album, fully funded by the tax, by using other people’s music and putting it through some old effects boxes he acquired. In turn, the end result is what some might call a pirated mash-up album, fully funded by an anti piracy tax. I’m sure not everyone would agree with his approach, but one (or at least I) have to love the mindset he took to get there:

“To me, ‘Frauds’ is a statement. There’s so much negativity in the debate. ‘File sharing means artists can’t…’, ‘File sharing means nobody will ever…’ I think it’s the opposite, I think the beautiful aspect of the digital era is that anything recorded can be remixed, tweaked and modified.”