 |
Wednesday, November 19, 2003 |
|
Tracking music trends through P2P networks Here's a report on how Music Labels are benefitting from and actually paying for research that mines and tracks music trends in peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa. "Despite their legal blitzkrieg to stop online song-swapping, many music labels are benefiting from ó and paying for ó intelligence on the latest trends in Internet trading. It's a rich digital trove these recording executives are mining. By following the buzz online, they can determine where geographically to market specific artists for maximum profitability.
"The record industry has always been more about vibe and hype," said Jeremy Welt, head of new media for Maverick Records in Los Angeles. "For the first time, we're making decisions based on what consumers are doing and saying as opposed to just looking at radio charts." "Traditionally, labels had relied for market research largely on commercial radio, MTV and music store sales. Label executives waited weeks to get feedback based on limited audience sampling ó typically by randomly calling listeners and asking if they recognized a song after hearing a snippet. Only after several weeks would they begin to get a picture of whether a single was getting heard. And until Soundscan began electronically tracking album sales in the 1990s, the industry relied only on a survey of music retailers to gauge fan interest.
The emergence of free online trading, beginning in the late 1990s with MP3.com and the original Napster, suddenly made it technologically feasible to track music consumption in a whole new way. "It's the most vast and scaleable sample audience that the world has ever seen," Garland said. BigChampagne data are essentially a tally of what millions of music fans are doing every hour. ......... BigChampagne doesn't identify individuals or gather usernames, Garland said. But by analyzing users' numeric Internet addresses, BigChampagne can still pinpoint location and give clients a sense of where an artist is most popular. By using BigChampagne, labels can release a song to radio and, if there are signs demand is brewing on the song-swapping networks, immediately make the single available on online retailers like Apple's iTunes Music Store, Welt said. The music industry's appetite for data is only growing as online sales begin to replace CDs. Earlier this year, BigChampagne granted a sales and licensing agreement to Premier Radio Networks, whose Mediabase service tracks radio airplay. The deal fuses Mediabase's tracking data with BigChampagne's, giving subscribers a way to see whether airplay or radio promotions spur online music downloads or sales, Garland said" Useful to latch onto a trend early. Sounds like a neat supplement for traditional tracking methods that typically analyse sales data and match them against survey numbers gathered through primary market research and audits. Issues of privacy however come to mind, although it is reported that that they donot capture individuals or usernames - but can users' numeric internet addresses are tracked. Makes me think too about similar implications for other P2P applications like Skype.
12:19:44 PM  comment [] trackback []
|
|
|
Copyright 2009 Dina Mehta
