clownstep and John B on file sharing

I ran into this John B interview by accident while checking what kind of fun stuff could be found on Google when looking up the word “Clownstep”.
Now since the guy made some really sweet tracks in the past, and he has a new album out, I thought I’d make the effort and find out what he had to say.

It’s mostly the same stuff you read in most of those kind of articles, but his opinion on p2p networks seems a bit stupid to me.

Here’s what he has to say:

Well, if people have bought my music and want to play it out, I don’t mind what they do with it. If I found somebody who has downloaded my music illegally, that is where I have a major issue with it. I understand people are going to download stuff and there’s not a lot you can do about it, apart from flooding the file sharing networks with fake versions of your tracks, which is what I’ve been doing aggressively. I’m going to do whatever I can. I’ll put viruses in them, or just make a track identically titled to what’s out there and make it 10 seconds of the track and the rest just noise, or, “Ha ha! Buy it here, you bastards!”

Ok, well, let’s see, so you don’t mind what people do who have actually bought your music, but you are thinking about infecting mp3’s with viruses anyway…
Hmmmm, how will you tell the difference between someone who is downloading the infected tunes and has bought the album, and those who haven’t?

Luckily for John B there is no way to infect mp3’s with a virus, otherwise he could get himself in some serious trouble, and frankly, I think that trying to get bad copies out there is more hassle than it’s worth since in the long run people are going to keep getting that tune until they get a good copy. And when they do they will share that one as well (unless they’re lame leechers) which will result in more sources for the good version than the bad ones, which will automatically make people download the good version instead of the bad one(s).

Funny artist still have a problem with seeing p2p downloads as a form of free mouth-to-mouth promotion. Maybe he doesn’t need this kind of promotion any more being one of the big names in the business, but I can tell you there are a lot of drum’n’bass artists I might have never bought anything from if I hadn’t learned about them by downloading some tracks off file sharing networks.
A lot of people will simply not buy the stuff they download, that’s true, but the question is, where they going to buy it if they wouldn’t be able to download it?
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that every single download is a sale lost.

Oh, I also noticed this clownstep merchandise, in John B’s blog, which is kinda funny.