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Tracking music file sharing Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/arizonaliving/articles/0325downloading25.htmlhttp://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/arizonaliving/articles/0325downloading25.html
Service tracks music-sharing on the Internet
Phil Kloer
Cox News Service
Mar. 25, 2003 12:00 AM
ATLANTA - As the music industry continues its struggle against Internet file-sharing, and tens of millions of downloaders continue to ignore the record labels' efforts, a group of Atlantans stand on the sidelines and keep track of what's at stake.
In a nondescript cubicle farm, BigChampagne is monitoring what file-sharers on systems such as Kazaa and Morpheus want.
The information races across computer screens faster than the human brain can process it - Jennifer Lopez, Moby, Pink, Infectious Grooves, Eminem, the Dixie Chicks. Listeners want it now, and they want it free.
"Sometimes it's kind of overwhelming - we're seeing 25 million searches a day," says Adam Toll, chief operations officer for BigChampagne (www.bigchampagne.com). What Nielsen is to TV ratings, BigChampagne is to the increasingly important measurement of what people are downloading off the Web. And if you use Kazaa, Morpheus, Limewire or one of the other major file-sharing programs, BigChampagne is watching you.
"This is where the action is," says Craig Marks, editor of Blender music magazine, about the importance of tracking music downloading.
After CD sales fell almost 11 percent in 2002, Hillary Rosen, chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, blamed Internet file-sharing for much of the decline, citing RIAA surveys.
"Our younger buyers are telling us they are buying significantly less albums because they're finding what they want on the Internet," she said recently.
No one knows how many people download music or how much, but there are about 20 million people doing it monthly. Forrester Research estimates 40 percent of adult Americans have downloaded music from the Internet.
But even as the labels and many musicians, from Jay Z to Madonna, condemn downloading, some of them pay BigChampagne to tell them what's going on in the netherworld of file-sharing.
"We work with all the major labels in the music business," says Eric Garland, chief executive officer of BigChampagne. "We work a lot with radio and dozens of individual artists and their management."
The labels won't admit that they use BigChampagne the way TV networks use Nielsen ratings because it might be seen as condoning file-sharing - and BigChampagne won't name clients. A spokesman for a major music conglomerate confirms some labels use BigChampagne, but would not speak on the record.
"(The labels) can't publicly admit it," says Marks, "but this is better information than they can get from SoundScan," the service that registers in-store CD sales.
BigChampagne can tell labels whether consumers are looking for a particular song or a particular artist. Users sometimes search for a particular musician because they want to download everything from that artist. In general, however, people search for specific songs.
"A song can be quite popular online and people download it, but nobody goes to buy it," Garland says.
BigChampagne doesn't side with either the industry or the downloaders, it just tracks what's happening.
Garland says he understands the labels' point of view: "Wait a minute . . . They smashed in the shop window and made off with our goods!"
But despite music industry efforts in court to shut down systems like Kazaa, "file-sharing is not going to go away," Toll says.
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