Buck 65 on Piracy

I saw this at Grand Good (a great blog that everybody should check out) and was really struck by Buck 65's comments.
Here’s a really great interview with Buck 65 over at Analogue Magazine.

Among other things, he speaks very candidly about bootlegging and how it affects him as an artist as well as on a personal level. I’ve never heard an artist comment about music piracy in the context of his/her relationship with the fans before. I wonder if Buck’s sentiments are common among those in the same predicament.

Link to Analogue Mag article.
and a Link to an article about Canadian music downloading at PimpWiz

"…on my last tour, I tried to help out my own cause. At a certain point, what becomes the focus for me is trying to make a living, and I don’t really have a fall back plan, so I have to figure out ways within this one thing I know how to do, to try to get my rent paid. So on my last tour, I put together a whole bunch of bootleg titles, and I was selling them, and about half way through the tour, I started to see the sales go way way down, and you know it didn’t take a genius to figure out it only took that number of weeks for it to spread all over the internet. But I was coming face to face with people who were walking up to the merch table, looking at everything that I had available there, and saying, ‘I’ve downloaded all this stuff, there’s nothing here for me’, and then just walking away. It’s kind of like, it’s one thing just to know that it’s happening out there, and it’s invisible. But to be confronted with it, face to face, to have a person walk right up to your face, and to say ‘I’ve stolen all your art, and I don’t give a shit, fuck you, you have nothing for me,’ and then just walking away, it’s weird, it’s really weird. Then later that night, you’re on stage, and you’re looking at all these people, and you’re performing for them, and you’re there to provide a service for them, and at the same time trying to remember all the things that are valuable and good about what you’re doing in the first place, i.e.: ‘I love this, I love music and that’s why I’m here’. But sometimes you have to fight off the feeling that your audience is also your enemy in a weird way. They’re the people preventing you from putting food in your mouth. At the end of the day they don’t give a shit about you. They will rob money right out of your pocket if they have the opportunity to do so. You have to try really hard to not think about that, but the reality of it is, essentially that’s what’s going on, and it’s gotten to the point, where people don’t mind telling you right to your face, ‘I don’t know who you are as a person, you may or may not be nice, but as far as what you can do for me, you know, it’s just a matter of what I can take from you, and if you can make some sort of separation, and separate out the human part of you, and really think about it in terms of, I don’t know what, cause it’s not business, stealing doesn’t really fit into a definition of business in a way that really makes sense..."