Man i feel your pain, me and holmz are dealing with the same issue
The smash brother’s album has been heavily bootlegged on the net. I put a Google tracker on our album name and we have received over 17,000 free downloads from Russia blog forum sites alone
Its has also popped up in hundreds of forums, blogs and torrents from china to Greece. Just type
"smash brothers-fear factor"
(with the quotes) in Google and you will see what I’m talking about.
I did the math and made rough estimated. Since December 08 that we have gotten about 15,000-20,000 hits to download our album for free. New links pop up every couple of days.(google tracker)
When I first found out about this I was pissed, I actually logged into one of the forums and argued with the dude that posted the link, in hindsight that was dumb as hell.
Basically holmz sat me down and was like “look we aint make this album to make money, we made it to get heard, and it is getting heard, world wide nigga LOL” A light blub went off in my head and I realized he was right. 5 -10 years ago there was no way some dude in china would be rocking an album made in the basement of a Brooklyn hip hop duo with no label support or budget. Now it’s a new day, if somebody likes your music they will share it, no matter way they are. So ride with it man. If people think your stuff is good enough to share and post then you know your doing something right. Also it’s a good way to get HONEST feedback on your work. Login to one of those forums and ask what they think about your album without telling them you’re the artist. You will be surprised.
You will also be surprised on the type of places that love your music, like I said before we are pretty heavly downloaded in the Russian underground hip hop forums. Almost all the torrents and links to our album are Russian sites. A couple of those sites listed our album as one of the top underground albums of 08, who knew? LOL. So if you can try and find out who is downloading you album, it will give you’re a sense of your fanbase for the future. Try to document it as well so you can have it for future reference.
So yea it sucks your not getting paid, but you are getting exposer and building a fan base, considering that your not signed or anything it’s a win win, now if you’re a signed artist and need to recoup money with album sales, that’s a whole nother story.
Jason aka classicbeatz