Iron Maiden uses piracy numbers to plan ‘massive sellout’ concert tours

Tom Sullivan
Wed, 2013-12-25

Iron Maiden, a band formed in 1975 that has sold more than 80 million albums while performing 2,000 concerts worldwide, uses information provided by music analytics company Musicmetric to help plan the course of an upcoming tour.

As illegal downloading and music streaming services have rendered physical album sales negligible to the point of irrelevance, artists have increasingly been forced to rely on concert tours and merchandise revenue.

With help from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), many labels have sought to recoup these losses by filing lawsuits against individual downloaders, with damages often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. The most famous example of this is possibly Metallica, the platinum-selling heavy metal group that attempted to sue the Napster file-sharing service a decade ago.

However, recent studies have shown that fans who download music illegally are often the most loyal in terms of concerts and merchandizing. A 2012 survey from the American Assembly, a non-partisan public policy forum affiliated with Columbia University, found that nefarious file-sharers tend to purchase 30 percent more music than customers who do not download anything illegally.

Source and full story: Russia Today, 25 December 2013