Merge co-founder and Superchunk bass player Laura Ballance said she would also like to see piracy addressed, though she acknowledged she doesn’t know exactly how. “Piracy especially hurts our smaller artists,” Ballance observed in an email. “The small releases that used to sell 3,000 copies are now selling less than 1,000. It makes releasing these records not fiscally viable for us or the artists who recorded them.”
And then you read about this, which is unfortunate. One has to wonder how many times these albums are pirated, but more importantly, how many times those downloads are actually played and enjoyed for free, which is when digital piracy shifts from meaningless gluttony to a legitimate lost sale.
It would be relevant to compare, say, a Last.fm listener base to album sales.
