Axl Rose has conducted his second online chat in a week, this time heading to the forum at chinesedemocracy.com to answer a few questions where he blamed the lack of sales for the `Chinese Democracy` album on illegal downloads and the greed of the record industry reports Undercover News.
About the downloads, he said, “Basically for us it's devastating across the board. And when u have such a majority openly justifying their actions and throwing out nonsense such as it's not actually stealing as the original is still with whomever it's unbelievably insane”.
He also had a swipe at record labels. “It exists because of the greed of the record industry, the greed of large scale pirating, the ease and common nature now of the act itself and personal motivations such as popularity among certain groups, possible momentary media recognition etc”.
He also agrees that piracy cannot be stopped. “And it's too rampant and widespread. It's simply too huge a mess for the courts to deal with and in that with those #'s and the expense and manpower involved necessary at this time to curtail it... obviously there are more serious crimes for society to focus on”.
His interesting comment is how would the album have done had the illegal downloads been counted as sales. “”What are our #'s on the torrent sites for this album? I don't know. So I don't know how or if it's affected us in terms of sales this time around. Maybe not but w/the economy and the core of our market I'd think there's a possibility it has had a negative effect. Anyone?”
In other related news, it appears that 'Chinese Democracy' is about to drop out of the Billboard Top 30 this week. Hitsdailydouble.com is registering the chart position at 31 for this week but that could vary for the official chart when it comes out Thursday. However, it won't move by much.
Hits reports the album sold around 48,000 units this week. Last week, it did around 56,000 and in week one sold 261,000 units.
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