Big Music spoof ‘marketing’ ploy
p2pnet.net News:- A scabby and deeply cynical practise employed by spammers hired by the Big Four Organized Music cartel is being described by The Wall Street Journal as a, “Marketing Opportunity”.
Under it, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG are trying to milk the same people they’re accusing of being “criminals” and “thieves”.
P2p file sharers are being villified by the labels through the mainscream media, but they’re still plenty good enough to be systematically targeted for sneak exploitation.
“In a tactic little known outside the music industry,” the record labels have, “also started to hire outside companies to plant ‘decoy,’ or fake, files on the sites,” says the story.
Spoofing is infamous online and has long been used by the Big Four’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). The idea is to flood the Net with corrupted files (spoofs) with the same ’signature’ (hash) as the genuine file.
This sucks up huge amounts of broadband. But that’s no problem for the labels which don’t have to pay for it and, “One such company, ArtistDirect Inc.’s MediaDefender, says it has deployed decoys for as many as 30 of the top 100 Billboard songs at any given time,” says the story, but, “there’s a growing recognition among some record executives and performers that the people who are downloading illegally are frequently huge music fans and that marketing to them may be more desirable in the long run than suing or otherwise harassing them”.
Now, there’s an “alliance” between Jay-Z and Coke and, “By inserting promotional material into the decoy files, and then planting those files prominently on file-sharing sites, record labels and other marketers can turn what is now an antipiracy tool into an advertising medium.
“The concept here is making the peer-to-peer networks work for us,” the WSJ has a Jay-Z lawyer saying. “While peer-to-peer users are stealing the intellectual property, they are also the active music audience,” and, “this technology allows us to market back to them.”
No, really. We’re not making this up.
At the moment, “only about 1% of the decoy files on peer-to-peer sites include promotions or ads, but the potential audience is huge. While many well-known peer-to-peer services such as eDonkey and Grokster [both now under Big Four control] have been shut down by legal action, new ones pop up all the time.
“In September, an average of nine million people were logged on to the services at any given time, up from 6.8 million two years ago, according to BigChampagne, which tracks the industry. By comparison, last month YouTube attracted about two million visitors a day and MySpace.com attracted 16.8 million visitors a day, according to comScore Media Metrix.”
And, “The typical downloader is a tech-savvy male between 14 and 25 years old. “It’s a wonderful audience that is very difficult to reach through any other means,” the WSJ has Mitchell Reichgut from Jun Group, the ad agency that “crafted” the Coke promo, saying, although marketing on p2p sites is, “a bit of a tricky dynamic for entertainment companies,” the story has Reichgut observing.
Why’s that? Because, “many of his clients in the entertainment industry don’t want to be identified”.
Meanwhole, not only are the labels using spoofs to scam the p2p community, they’re also using them to gather data for further exploitation.
“Some music acts are using peer-to-peer sites to gather marketing data,” says the WSJ. “Over the summer, MediaDefender ran a promotion for the alternative music group Gin Blossoms. File sharers looking for songs got files with links that asked if they wanted to win a free iPod preloaded with Gin Blossoms tunes. If they clicked on the link, they landed on a page that asked them to fill in demographic data, including name, age and email address, and 25% of them did. MediaDefender executives say they were surprised so many responded, but they believe that placing the questionnaire on ArtistDirect, a well-known music site, gave the promotion legitimacy.”
But the labels are by no means have it all their own way and, “some file-sharing sites are fighting back against the marketing-infused decoy files, which they consider spam. When they release new versions of their filesharing programs, they are including tweaks that can make planting the covert ads more difficult.”
Interestingly LimeWire, currently embroiled in a Big Four lawsuit, is to the fore in this, says the story, adding, “The latest version of LimeWire, for example, won’t allow people responding to other users’ searches to easily include a link to a Web page.”
And you thought the Big Four couldn’t go any lower?
Also See:
The Wall Street Journal – Record Labels Turn Piracy Into a Marketing Opportunity, October 18, 2006
at any given time – p2p file sharing is IN, October 17, 2006
currently embroiled – LimeWire vs RIAA for 2008?, October 17, 2006
p2pnet newsfeeds for your site.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss
Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
October 20th, 2006 at 11:47 am
A scabby and deeply cynical exercise is publishers merging an anonymous flame with someone elses news report to libel someone or perhpas having people recite the libel on your site whilst chanting free speech (by which you mean you should be free- but noone else) to libel people
October 20th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
Is there a gibberish translator in the house? I can’t make head nor nail of that uber-babble you flung onto the screen during your latest spasmodic seizure. You should offer your posting style to hospital operating theatres as a highly-effective alternative to unconsciousness-inducing medications.
October 21st, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Come on now. What would we do for troll laughs without Gachnar?
October 21st, 2006 at 2:27 pm
Does this mean we can bust them under anti-spam legislation?
May 28th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
The RIAA shouldn’t be allowed to plant decoy files in p2p systems, there has to be some way to prevent that.