Catamenia’s new album “The Time Unchained” is out and it rocks like hell! Its intensity rivals Kalmah’s “For The Revolution”, pure angry pressure with great dramaturgism and epic melodies. 10 out of 10 for both albums from me!
There are a lot of bands in the extreme metal genre producing really fast and brutal music that doesn’t exactly sound bad, but which somehow completely fail to procure any emotions in me. It contains all the elements I see in the tracks I like, yet somehow, it doesn’t catch. Setherial is an example of this kind of music.
Some would describe it by saying the music doesn’t have a soul, but the description I prefer is that the music doesn’t tell a story. Not the lyrics. The melody has to tell a story. What I enjoy are tales of tragedy, loss and bitterness, then followed by a buildup, the revenge that culminates in brutal, angry and desperate sections.
Catamenia has done this right before, but never so right as in “The Time Unchained”. The tracks on this album are truly excellent. Kalmah on the other hand broke from their previous style with “For the Revolution”. I slightly mourn the loss of the old Kalmah, but then again, the junky in me calls for the next fix each time I listen to their new style.
Now what’s this all to do with music piracy?
Well, apart from the fact that I’m currently listening to a pirated version of “The Time Unchained”, simply because Amazon didn’t manage to ship the CD to me before the weekend, I discovered something in this pirated version that provides me with quite an ingenious way to count the number of legal vs. pirated copies.
The first song of the album is mistagged. It’s actual name is “Garden of Thorns”, but whatever idiot ripped it not only failed to do a proper rip, he also wrote the name as “Garden of Eden”. Now my assumption is that everyone who listens to the pirated version of the album will have the song as “Garden of Eden” in their playlist and that everyone who own the actual CD will have the song as “Garden of Thorns” in their playlist.
Combine that idea with a service such as last.fm, which tracks what people are listening to in order to provide them with online recommendations, and you should be able to see how many of the last.fm users listened to the pirated album and how many actually own the album:
Catamenia - VIII - The Time Unchained - Garden of Eden: 3,276 plays.
Catamenia - VIII - The Time Unchained - Garden of Thorns: 778 plays.
That’s sad. For each person who bought the album, more than 4 others are listening to pirated copies.
As far as I can tell, the release was not “leaked” - you could buy the CD in stores before the first pirated copy of the album appeared on file sharing networks. It might be that a lot of last.fm users do what I do and “test-drive” new bands by downloading their albums first and buying their CDs later (if they like them), but even with this is mind, a 4 to 1 ratio seems quite high.
I don’t know the numbers, but if you test-drive, you might listen to anywhere between 2 random tracks and the whole album a dozen times. On the other hand, it’s been a month since the album was released, so there was ample time to buy the album and fill up the number of the proper named track’s play count with relistens. And last.fm’s well-working recommendation system should keep the test-drive-and-dislike number low and the test-drive-and-buy number high.
Still thinking about what to make of these numbers…
Recent Comments