Drummer Nicko McBrain and the rest of British metal legends Iron Maiden are dealing with music piracy and illegal downloads in a unique way: they turn free file-sharing into fee-paying fans.
Iron Maiden hired a company called Musicmetric, which specializes in analytics for the music industry by capturing everything from social media discussion to traffic on the BitTorrent network.
The band noted a huge amount of BitTorrent traffic in South America, particularly in Brazil and Chile.
Brazilians pirated Iron Maiden music nearly 500,000 times in recent years. Chile is another flashpoint with 1,300 downloads for every 100,000 internet users. A total of 70,932 downloads, according to numbers provided by TorrentFreak.
Nicko and the band didn't use the data to file a lawsuit against those fans. Instead, they've been using the information to perform concerts for them.
Rather than send in a team of lawyers, the musicians recognized a profit potential and sent themselves in.
After all, fans can't download a concert or t-shirts. The result is massive sellouts. A São Paolo show in 2012 alone grossed £1.58 million (US$2.58 million) alone.
It turns out that fans who download music illegally are often the most loyal in terms of concerts and merchandizing.
