Trouble over Beirut

It's probably crossed the mind of anyone who finds themselves receiving one of those watermarked pre-release CDs, with the dire warnings about being tracked down if the songs appear on file-sharing networks, do any labels really pay for this expensive fingerprinting? Isn't it just a question of sending out identicial CDs and pretending? And if they really do employ fingerprinting, has anyone ever been hunted down?

Erik Davis knows the answer is yes, and yes. He'd accidently sent a watermarked copy of Ba-da Bing's Beirut release to a thrift store. The purchaser had uploaded the tracks. And Ba-da Bing were unhappy:

After giving me less than 24 hours to respond to his initial accusation—during which time I was rambling around the Black Rock desert in a fire truck with a flame thrower on the roof—the label owner went on the warpath. [Ben Goldberg of Ba-Da Bing] sent out emails to all his publicist contacts and indy label buddies about my evil ways, and was in addition stirring up as much journalistic interest as possible, giving The Flying Club Cup a nice dose of early publicity while also being able to tar and feather a suddenly non-anonymous practitioner of the file-sharing arts.

I felt pretty shitty about all this. Last year I wrote extensively about Joanna Newsom’s Ys, which was famously leaked from a Pitchfork server, and I know the pain such leaks causes to artists and smaller labels alike. That said, I also know its not necessarily the worse thing in the life of a record, and I was pissed that Goldberg took to the wires before talking to me and trying to figure out why a 40-year-old guy who writes for righteous publications like Arthur would do something to fuck over a righteous independent label.

I called up a handful of my publicist friends, some of whom actually seemed to believe me, and eventually talked to Goldberg. I apologized, he explained his feelings, we bonded over our shared love of the Dead C. Hatchets were buried, and though I suspect my flow of advances might slow over the coming months, the prospect of being reviewed in Blender or Arthur will, in the end, keep most publicists supplying me with product—although the "product" in question will increasingly be a url. And people wonder why I mostly buy vinyl!

So, in effect, the expensive watermarking didn't really achieve anything - as, apart from the inability of the technology to prevent the upload and the lack of any real response from Ba-Da Bing, the label hadn't even mentioned that the track was watermarked on the sleeve. So the supposed threat - meant to stay the hand of the writer as he leans towards Bittorrent - wasn't even present.