Written on February 16, 2008 – 4:25 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Last week I posted a story here titled “Record Label quits, uploads music to The Pirate Bay“. I had received a tip that Dependent Records had decided to quit their business and uploaded all their music to The Pirate Bay. The whole story turned out to be a hoax. Something I could have found out myself if I had taken the time to contact Dependent Records to ask for confirmation. But I didn’t. Instead I checked if the music was actually there, read a few comments and figured the story was good enough to run. The next day Dependent Records came out with an official statement that the whole thing was a hoax. By then the story was posted to many popular blogs and we all had to retract, edit and/or amend our stories and apologize to Dependent Records and our readers.
Since the news broke that this was a hoax and not a true story I have been having a heated debate with Stefan Herwig, the victim of this hoax, about the ethics of bloggers and their attitude in this whole situation both here in the comments and at the Dependent Records Forum. Stefan Herwig obviously is not very happy with all these blogs writing stuff about him that isn’t true. I understand that but also think that it will be hard to avoid and blame the person who started this hoax more than the bloggers who fell for it. Not a subject we will reach an agreement on soon.
Enough reason to give Stefan Herwig the chance to tell us what actually happened and who is to blame. The following is the result of an email interview between The Next Web Blog and Stefan Herwig from Dependent Records.
Stefan Herwig
We heard a lot of different stories of what happened. Can you give us YOUR side of the story?
“Well, someone over the weekend took the “liberty” to take parts of our record catalogue and put it online as torrent files through The Pirate Bay. This person added a little text in German and english, but it was only a few lines. Somebody at Torrentfreak stumbled over it, thought that it was true, and brought it as a story, without checking back with us. From there other magazines including yours linked the story or brought it themselves with minor modifications.” (more…)
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Written on February 11, 2008 – 7:16 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
German Independent music label ‘Dependent records’ has announced that they are shutting down their business. But they don’t just hold a bargain sale or sell off their rights. They decided to upload ALL their records onto The Pirate Bay a few days ago accompanied with a message:
I closed down my record label Dependent Records for good. But since I want my music to be heard by the people out there, everything I have ever published is now available on The Pirate Bay. This is a LEGAL torrent!
Over the past few years more artists have decided to make their music available for free. But most do it in hopes of ultimately reaching more listeners who are willing to buy their records. This move sounds like a great PR stunt, except that there won’t be anybody left to benefit from it.
One of the reasons Dependent records has decided to give up on selling music is the P2P networks. Its CEO Stefan Herwig once wrote “A popular claim often seen on Internet fora maintains that the P2P culture weakens the majors and bolsters the independent labels. This is, we can assure you, 100% bullshit. Even if there are listeners who download first and buy later, they are clearly in the dwindling minority.”
One can’t help but wonder if other labels are going to follow this example. Until then, now is your chance to get “Bind, torture, kill” and “Cause of Death: Suicide” by “Suicide Commando” for free…
UPDATE: I received several emails (also see comments here) that this news is incorrect. So far, no official comment has been placed on the Dependent Records website but their music CAN be found on The Pirate Bay and their Wikipedia page has been updated with the same story. So it might be a PR stunt after all…
UPDATE II: Dependent Records have posted a formal reply in which they deny this story and blame blogs for not investigating further. Wikipedia has been updated and all blogs are updating their websites. So to recap: Yes, Dependent Records is shutting down. Yes, their whole catalog is available on The Pirate Bay. No, Stefan Herwig did not personally upload his catalog to The Pirate Bay.
I also have a note about his accusation that ‘we’ should have investigated further. In hindsight he is right, of course. In reality we do try to confirm if news is real or not. Unfortunately it would take way to long to prove that all news IS real. We check as many sources as we can and if all looks right we publish. The original article had a lot of comments, none hinting that something could be wrong. Wikipedia reflected the news and we could find the music on The Pirate Bay posted by a ‘Stefan Herwig’. Was that proof that this story was valid? No, but it was enough to run with it. We don’t actually check with Yahoo or Microsoft either to find proof for news. The companies who the news is about often simply reply with ‘No comment’ when we ask for confirmation.
Fortunately we can update our stories and say ‘We Were Wrong’. Mea culpa.
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