Is the piracy of music a big deal? On the business side of things, sure. Music downloaded basically equals to album/single sales that have been potentially lost. After all if you can have it for free, why bother paying for it, right? Record labels, publishers, and some artists see it that way, but then again there are also those who don’t think of it as too big a deal, and legendary British metal band, Iron Maiden, is one of them. The band relied on data-mining company, Musicmetric, to monitor its growth on social media websites and found that there was a spike in popularity over in Latin America.

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Ironically enough Latin America is also where a large amount of Iron Maiden’s materials get pirated, but instead of using those metrics to hunt the pirates down, Iron Maiden decided to fly down there and put on a show for them. Their efforts, instead of pursuing the legal option, have actually managed to net the band around $2.5 million in revenue from a single show that was recently held in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This move also managed to garner the band an additional 5 million followers on its social media pages from 2012 to 2013.

Artists typically make a huge bulk of their money from touring and selling merchandize. While album sales are important, they are typically used to help recoup expenses made by the record label in the production and marketing of the album, with cuts typically favoring the label (although this depends on the contract between the artist and the label). Iron Maiden is also well-established which means that this would be easier for them to pull off compared to an up and coming artist, but what do you guys think?

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