Labels Peer at Pirates for Insights

[janett999]

Say what you will about Internet pirates, their downloads speak volumes about what's hot in music.

That fact hasn't been lost on record labels, which are increasingly subscribing -- albeit discreetly -- to companies that monitor illegal download traffic on peer-to-peer services.

"If we weren't looking at the data, we'd be pretty foolish," says Jeremy Welt, head of new media at Madonna's Maverick Records, one of the few labels that admits to subscribing to services that track illegal downloads.

But John Fagot, a consultant for Webspins, a company that monitors P2P services, says its data is being used at every major label.

BigChampagne, the other major player, acknowledges that Warner Bros., Interscope, Elektra, DreamWorks, Atlantic and Disney's Hollywood label have all used its data, as well as MTV and MTV2.

All of which raises the question, Does the industry's use of peer-to-peer data for marketing purposes somehow add legitimacy to the very services that it is trying to stamp out through an aggressive legal campaign?

"Just as it is valuable to understand how pirated CDs are hawked at flea markets, the same applies to the online world. That in no way is any justification for the illegal activity or those who facilitate it," says a spokesperson for the Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA), the lobbying arm of the major U.S. record labels.

SEARCHING DATA

BigChampagne, which is based in Beverly Hills, Calif., and opened for business in 2000, tracks the two basic activities that can be monitored on peer-to-peer networks: "queries," or searches, and "acquisitions," or downloads.

Then it matches a computer's IP address to its zip code, creating a map of P2P activity.

Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, says searches can isolate the use of any form of copyrighted material, from music, feature films, software and videogames to instruction manuals or TV episodes.

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http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...5&section=news