Music Ally

Rapidshare? Is that the same Rapidshare that’s one of the biggest venues for online music piracy? Absolutely. Label Earache Records has cut a deal to make the new album by thrash metal band Gama Bomb available through the site on 5 November, three months before the release of a CD version with extra tracks.

“The idea is for the greater good, to give fans a taste of Gama Bomb for free, legally,” says Earache MD Digby Pearson. “Actually, the cost saving of distribution through the internet is a big incentive for us. Piracy is not a problem, because if a fan passes on the download link it can also be seen as free promotion for the band.”

It’s not the first example of music being legitimately distributed using a service more often associated with piracy (it’s important to be accurate here: Rapidshare itself is not an illegal service). But it’s one of the more high-profile examples of a label doing it.

Not heard Gama Bomb? Be our guest:

German collecting society GEMA has emerged victorious from its court battle against file-hosting service Rapidshare, with the court ruling that Rapidshare is responsible for ensuring that a list of 5,000 copyrighted music tracks aren”t made available on its site for download again.

“This means that the copyright holder is no longer required to perform the ongoing and complex checks,” says a statement from GEMA. The court also ruled that Rapidshare’s existing precautions to prevent illegal sharing of music files were not sufficient. Rapidshare has responded by suggesting that the courts of appeal are likely to restrict the scope of this decision, though.

“For this reason, we think that it would make more sense to work together to provide music fans with the right services at the right price and to open up a new source of income for music-markets on the internet,” says Rapidshare COO Bobby Chang.

There’s plenty of noise today about file-hosting service Rapidshare apparently providing record labels with details of users accused of uploading pre-release albums to the site.

The labels can then take this IP address data to ISPs to identify the users – with one person already saying he’s been the subject of a police raid after uploading a copy of Metallica’s Death Magnetic to his Rapidshare account a day before its release.

It’s a sign that the music industry is taking the piratical threat posed by sites like Rapidshare seriously, rather than just focusing on P2P. Research indicates that particularly for pre-release leaks, file-hosting sites are increasingly important.