Iron Maiden use online piracy to boost ticket sales

The British masters of heavy metal, Iron Maiden, are working in partnership with Musicmetric to use the online piracy phenomenon as a tool to make more profits from ticket sales.
Indeed, the legendary nwobhm band, instead of trying to find ways to punish and sanction those pirating their music, are gathering data that is useful to plan their tours; it's pretty simple: they asked the help of an analytic company to determine where their music is being pirated from (so, where they have more fans) and then setting tour dates in the most lucrative areas.

The partnership with the UK-based Musicmetric company showed Iron Maiden that, besides their usual major markets in the U.K. and U.S., there was a noted spike of traffic in South America, and also that a large chunk of the band's Twitter followers were from the continent as well.
"Iron Maiden's BitTorrent data suggests Brazil is a huge driver of fans - and given Brazil is one of the biggest file sharing nations on the planet, this is a strong indicator of popularity", commented Gregory Mead, CEO and co-founder of Musicmetric. And he added: "With their constant touring, [the] report suggests Maiden have been rather successful in turning free file-sharing into fee-paying fans. This is clear proof that taking a global approach to live touring can pay off, and that having the data to track where your fan bases lie will become ever more vital".