Arctic Monkeys have slammed people who they say are “ripping off” fans by selling freely available music via online websites such as eBay.
Before the Number One success of ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ dozens of studio demos by the band were made freely available to download and passed around between fans at gigs. Many of the tracks have been re-recorded for the band’s debut album which is released next year.
NME.COM has discovered that some people are collecting the original demos together onto CD and selling them on as unofficial ‘albums’ via internet websites.
The band’s label Domino Records are furious, and say that the songs which are available for nothing should remain free.
“Domino will endeavour to halt the blatant ripping off of fans by those who cobble together freely available Arctic Monkeys music on the net and sell it for profit,” a spokesperson said. “In practise this mainly involves us manually removing these perpetrators on an individual basis from sites such as eBay.”
A spokesperson for eBay also urged people not to buy from bootleggers. He said: “I urge fans to download these songs from the Arctic Monkeys website. We remove bootlegs as soon as we’re made aware of them. As there’s three million items live at any time in the UK we’d urge people to let us know if they find anything they’re not happy with.”
Early, official Arctic Monkeys releases are now becoming extremely valuable. Last week a copy of the band’s debut single ‘Five Minutes With The Arctic Monkeys’ was sold in the region of £100.