Not really that relevant but I always think of it when I think of Boards and it's kinda entertaining so why not.
Back in the Napster days they released their latest album onto all the major services themselves, with a catch; all their songs were like distorted crappy versions, missing elements, missing parts of the tracks, containing anti piracy recorded vocals, etc as some anti piracy thing. Of course you could still find the real versions but it muddied the water, it was hard to know which was which, or that a bad version even existed at all. It's made funnier by the fact that they were, especially at the time, some real avant garde indie shit. So I thought I might like them based on hearing one song and some friends that liked them, and I went and downloaded their (at the time) recent album. I grabbed the bad version without realizing that such a thing had even existed. I listened to it for a week thinking it was just really weird experimental shit that I totally didn't understand, hated it, deleted it, and thought nothing of it.
A few years later when I started to have real disposable income some friends were talking about going to see them, and wanted me to come. I convinced them instead to go see M83 with me because I was still totally convinced Boards were this weird shitty experimental shit and a group of like 5 of us bought M83 tickets instead (long before M83 released Midnight City) and went. Had a blast, one of my top shows ever. Glad it worked out that way honestly.
A few years after that I stumbled on some Boards on a playlist that a friend had created and was so confused. This was not the music I had known from them, it was actually really good stuff, right up my alley. At this point I was into streaming and had gone through my "I have money and want to buy music" stage and into the more modern "I'll just sign up for a streaming service" stage. It all kinda fell into place at that point and I did some digging and turns out yep, they had released an album or two of just complete nonsense to try to deter piracy. Back when I was pirating I didn't have money so I was never buying their music anyway. Years later I had a chance to support them by going to a concert, buying some merch, and convinced an entire group of people to spend no money on that because I thought their music was shit.
So I always like to use this as an anecdote for why trying to be anti pirate is fucking dumb. Piracy is going to happen. Lean into it and provide a service that the piracy services can't and make the money downstream in merch, concerts, fan events, etc. I always wonder how many people went through the weird experience I did with their anti piracy album and how much it cost them long term to release absolute garbage onto Napster to try to deter piracy. Probably not much, but it makes me laugh that it cost them my money at least.
that's a funny story, I didn't know BoC (or any artist) did that, seems kinda silly with how things developed since then, they probably lost some other potential fans due to that, Napster was pre-torrent so maybe they assumed file sharing could be contained, if I remember right some PC games used that approach too.. changing little config details to make the game worse, there's a larger conversation to be had here about media business models, internet maturity, and some other things, it's interesting to think about how things were perceived in the late 90s and how they turned out
