Buckcherry’s manager decided to give his band a little boost by leaking a single onto the Internet via BitTorrent, and got caught.
We don’t begrudge any creative performer the right to self-promote. The age of the patron of the arts has long passed into history, and it’s up to the hard-working artist to hustle as well as perform. One can list at length any number of musicians, in this example, who found themselves unhappy with someone like a big label controlling their future.
So if someone can get attention for their act, major label or not, more power to them. But in Buckcherry’s example, their approach to doing so may have been a little too cynical and calculating for comfort.
TorrentFreak figured out Buckcherry’s piracy-victim ploy a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to a little sleuthing, TorrentFreak caught Buckcherry blaming piracy for the promoting their manager conducted:
It turns out that the uploader, a New York resident, had only uploaded one torrent, the BuckCherry track. When we entered the IP-address into the Wiki-scanner, we found out that the person in question had edited the BuckCherry wikipedia entry, and added the name of the band manager to another page.
This confirmed our suspicions, but it was not quite enough, since it could be an overly obsessed fan (if they have fans). So, we decided to send the band manager, Josh Klemme – who happens to live in New York – an email to ask for his opinion on our findings. Klemme, replied to our email within a few hours, and surprisingly enough his IP-address was the same as the uploader.
As Robert Cray might call it, “a still hot, smokin’ gun.” TorrentFreak suggested that Buckcherry’s label, Atlantic Records, already plays the P2P spam game by plugging songs into file sharing networks. The real idiocy comes from Buckcherry tossing out a press release complaining about the ‘piracy’ that got one of their singles some attention.
Not cool, and not very respectful of other working musicians.
