Pirate Bay (single)

This song is dedicated to The Pirate Bay and to the cool people behind it.

Already for years Pirate Bay has served netlabel Musictrade as a great global distribution platform, allowing us to release our music instantly to a global audience without any costs at all. We have seeded hundreds of gigabytes of our music through Pirate Bay's trackers, which converts to terabytes of music distributed with the help of mesh participants coming from all around the globe.

In the recent trial proceedings Peter Sunde characterized The Pirate Bay as an 'equalizer' in distribution. This has been our experience as well. On The Pirate Bay all released music is on the same line. Big promotion budgets, manipulated radio playlists and artificial media hype mean nothing there, only the content itself matters. Every sharer has an equal possibility of making an interesting textual description of what is being shared, and for a little while every sharer gets a global front page exposure in the never-ending stream of new releases. That's a very free and democratic environment for content producers, and to some it may sound almost revolutionary in the equality it provides. But it is really no more revolutionary than a library where all books are on the same line, side by side in alphabetic order, whether from established writers printed by big publishers or from unknown writers printed by small publishers. In the world of culture this is a natural order of things, and The Pirate Bay has brought this free library-like environment to the digital domain. This is a task that should naturally belong to the existing tax-funded national and local libraries, but as things are for now, our elected politicians in control of those libraries have chosen to serve the vested interests of the international copyright lobby rather than the interests of the people, of the culture and of the artists.

The track utilizes in mash-up fashion fresh audio material from the Pirate Bay trial that was held in Stockholm, Sweden in February-March 2009.

There is now also a music video available for this song. You can watch it at Vimeo and at YouTube, and a higher resolution version is downloadable as a torrent from Mininova.