Monday, April 4, 2011

Cameron Tilbury vs One Soul Thrust

Cameron Tilbury is the manager for a band named "One Soul Thrust", and I feel sorry for the band.

In April of 2011, Tilbury broke the news that One Soul Thrust's debut album had been downloaded illegally over 100,000 times. A small band was being decimated by piracy. They'd gone Pirate-Platinum despite being an obscure band whose one youtube video had less than 80 views. I have videos of my toddler online that have more views than that.

The claim that a band with no real Internet presence could have racked up 100,000 illegal downloads was a red flag to a number of people. After some due diligence it turned out that the claims of One Soul Thrust having 100,000 illegal downloads were complete and bull. Cameron Tilbury, the man claiming there have been 100,000 illegal downloads has released his "evidence", which consists of a screen shot of an advertisement. TorrentFreak details the story in their article CRIA Watches Massive Music Piracy Crisis Devastate Unknown Band. Specifically, the ad is for LimeTorrents, a site that uses your search terms to make up fictional torrents with massive download rates in order to get you to click on the link.

The article One Soul Thrust – Who Is Lying To Them reveals that the album isn't even on Gnutella.

Tilbury however hasn't admitted his mistake,. Far from it. He's defending his position on the Balanced Copyright For Canada Facebook wall.

He's even being a jackass about it. For example, Trent Morley pointed out that Tilbury was responding to requests for supporting evidence with name calling Tilbury wrote:
Cameron Tilbury: So are you Trent. I've substantiated our claims to real journalists, not silly little bloggers who hide behind cute names. Nice loyalty on your part, I have to say. Class.

All anyone has had to do is contact me directly. The only ones who ha...ve done that are legit journalists and CRIS. I will not condutct this the way you kids want to play. Grow up."

If that's the case then it should be fairly simple for Tilbury to provide the same evidence to bloggers. Based on the Google results for the band's name bloggers are the primary people writing about this anyway. Deliberately excluding the people who are providing the most information on the issue only guarantees their version will dominate the conversation.

The fact-checking articles I've linked above make it pretty clear that no such torrent actually exists. The question becomes not one of if the piracy is occurring, it's not, but one of motive. Is Cameron Tilbury malevolent and trying to use this to get press attention or is he merely incompetent? He's clearly failed the band in his efforts to promote them. Is this an attempt to excuse his failure to get the band more paying gigs? Is he actually foolish enough to think no one would research his claims? Is he deliberately trying to make a fool of himself online to promote the band?

Tilbury's response on his web site is vacuous to say the least. He never admits that the download figures were based on bad information. He seems downright offended that anyone is even asking him for evidence. In the end his post devolves into an anti-piracy rant, never mentioning the white elephant in the room: The Piracy he's claiming happened to One Soul Thrust did not happen.

It's pretty clear One Soul Thrust needs a new manager. He's technologically incompetent and his management of this debacle is proving a complete inability to understand the relevance of the Internet in marketing the band. There are a lot of graceful ways he could have handled this and benefited his client but they all entail admitting he was wrong. A bigger man could do that. Cameron Tilbury however, does not appear to be a big enough man to admit a mistake.

Now, just for fun, here are some other torrent search results that claim far more downloads than are feasible. Keep in mind, none of these files actually exist, but the images below constitute the same level of evidence that Tilbury provided to TorrentFreak to support his claims of piracy. His screen shots showed download counts similar to the ones in the screen shots below. He appears to have gotten his 100,000 number by totaling the results. This means if the information Cameron Tilbury has released about One Soul Thrust is proof of massive piracy, then Cameron Tilbury is a piracy-platinum blue movie star.

Cameron Tilbury Dealing with constipation audio book

Cameron Tilbury Gay Sex Tape

Cameron Tilbury on the Nixon Tapes

Cameron Tilbury Murder Conviction read in court

To the best of my knowledge, Cameron Tilbury has never starred in a gay sex movie, written a book about constipation or been convicted of murder, but his own standard of evidence, screen shots from dodgy torrent search sites, would suggest otherwise.

I doubt he ever shagged Chris Crocker either: Cameron Tilbury caught in bed with Chris Crocker

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Piracy advocates like you belong in jail.

Anonymous said...

What piracy? We are talking about One Soul Thrust here.

Anonymous said...

Alternatively Cameron could be a touch smarter than people were giving him credit for, and that he was using the inflated numbers to try and secure the bands signing with a major label such as Warner.

Whether it was that, or simply trying to create publicity (goog or bad)

I think what ever the marketing idea he had, has now back fired however.

Anonymous said...

If Tilbury was as smart as he seems to think he is, he would never have alienated the new fans redirected to the FB page of One Soul Thrust (sent by a link from the Torrentfreak article, no less) by both deleting ALL comments (including those of support) and completely locking down the page to prevent new comments. That is an obvious PR no-no. Even I'd have had enough internet savvy to use the massive amount of traffic generated by that article to substantially (by which I mean possible double or triple) increase their fanbase and exposure to new markets. Instead, he seems to be too ego-driven to admit his mistake and USE the situation to his advantage. IMHO, he's completely incompetent, and has damaged that poor band, possibly beyond repair.

Matthew Miller said...

If he'd been willing to eat a slice of humble pie he could have benefited his band immensely. He could have used the fact that he was mislead by spam as an additional point to attack piracy. Changing his tune to attack the deceptive nature of the ads while admitting he was fooled could have painted him as someone capable of learning as well as further demonized the unauthorized file sharing he wants to attack.

In the end he just looks like a chump who can't tell spam from actual data and can't learn from his own mistakes. An inability to learn is not a trait one wants in a manager.