Cheeky Monkey's

Is it just me or are the Arctic Monkeys record company taking the piss?

It was file-sharing that helped them distribute their music to listeners for free but, now it seems that profits are their biggest concern. The Arctic Monkey's were the breakthrough act of the download era, the band that used MySpace and file-sharing to build their audience, in fact if it weren't for the Sheffield based band you'd be hard pushed to find anybody over the age of 45 even aware of P2P.

Now though the Monkey's have employed the services of a company called Web Sheriff to make sure that their new album gets it's first hearing when they want, rather than when their buying and file sharing public wants.

The band's record label V2, has hired the London based network copyright monitor, to protect against the new album from spreading across the internet. According to a spokesman for Web Sheriff “They were looking at up to one million illegal MP3 song files spreading of an album which was supposed to break the band internationally.”

The irony here of course is that the band are currently on tour promoting the new album, one of the young women in the office went to see them at Southampton last week and said that hardly anybody in the crowd knew the new songs - part of the crowd experience at gigs is singing along isn't it? You can hardly hum to twelve tracks, well one or two maybe but then I bet you'd start laughing!

Is the use of a web sheriff really a good thing? Do they risk turning off their audience if they suddenly seems as corporate and regulated as all the others? Maybe, maybe not. One thing I know is that if their core supporters start receiving letters threatening legal action for posting the band's content illegally that they risk losing the core audience that's responsible for them getting a record deal in the first place.