Steven Wilson begging in Facebook

 

Thank you very much, NotAProghead

What is considered as Piracy is a fine line, some might want to help the artist meanwhile having the opposite effect, I feel that each case or group should be judged individually. As an example fans who bought the original album and they loved it might feel an urge or need to spread their emotions and wanting to share a link via youtube hoping others will feel the same about the artist (with best intentions) they will google search a song and most times will pick the one which has the most viewers or likes to share, most of those are not official links to the artists yet they did share it with the utmost best intentions, trying to make others realize how wonderful the artist is and sounds, one could think of it as free publicity. There's no doubt that the internet can make (or bankrupt) an artist.

There is also the magnitude of each sharing method to consider - trading tapes between friends is a 1:1 relationship - pirated tapes is a 1:many relationship - neither of those had a significant impact. No one knows the raltionship of illegal downloading (because no one can count the actual number of downloads) but since the method of production is infinite and the ease with which anyone can do it means a greater number of people can do it then the potential relationship approaches the infinite. When artists can observe CD sales decline the instant an album is leaked we can assume it is significant, and there are many other observable effects we can detect that indicate that illegal downloading has a greater impact and is far more significant than any other pirating method.