Hey, it’s Nancy here from soon-to-be world famous pop group Nancy and the Meerkats!
So we’ve finally got our track online and we looked at how many downloads it’d had. Had we hit the big time? Turns out… no! We’d only sold 4 copies!
Even though downloads weren’t great we thought we’d look at our website and on forums to see what people though about Nancy and the Meerkats.
On this pop forum, there were loads of people talking about our record and how great it is, but none of them had bought it – how did they manage to do that?
Joe worked out they must have got a copy from some other site and not one that we’d given permission to.
I loved that people were sharing our music. It meant more people knew about us. But Joe said sharing something that isn’t yours to share is not such a good thing. In a way, all those people who have downloaded free copies are doing the same thing as walking out of a shop with a CD and forgetting to go to the till!
People were stealing our record which is terrible! All the work we put in to it, all those hours choosing which collar I was going to wear… It sounds like the sort of thing that that maddening moggy Kitty Perry would do!
People probably don’t know that it is illegal – they just think it’s free! What these sites are doing is sometimes called piracy. It not only affects music, but also videos, books and movies. If someone owns the copyright to something, well it is stealing – simple as that.
The meerkats then decided to do a pirate jam with matching pirate outfits!
Click here to listen to Episode 8!
And if you want to get really creative, make sure you check out how to protect your cracking ideas! Click here to find out more!
Nancy and the Meerkats is supported by the Intellectual Property Office.
Click here to find out more!