Earlier today I was reviewing the statistics from the our web shop and noticed that quite a few people/sites have been linking to our shop release images directly (so-called "hotlinking"). This is an irritant because it means that our bandwidth gets used for things that don't really have anything to do with the shop and that costs us some money if it happens a lot, and worse yet, at least one of the hotlinks was from a blog that is used to distribute illegal downloads.
It's hard to get statistics about how much illegal downloading actually takes place, but since they linked to our image, our server faithfully kept track of how many times someone loaded that image on the blog. In the month of October, that image was downloaded 31,000 times and so far in November, it's at 12,300 hits. That's a lot of hits for one release on a small independent label.
As an aside, I've since taken steps to make sure that hotlinking on our site doesn't work very well. I'm sure they'll be surprised to see the images have changed.
