P2p or Ipod?
p2pnet.net News:- We often quote stats from Big Champagne when we say downloads from iTunes and the other plastic online music stores supplied the Big Five amount to zip stacked against what’s happening on the p2p networks.
In Napplester in the UK, we said: “Apple is hoping to build on the phenomenal success of its music store in the US, where it has sold more than 70m songs over the internet since launching in April 2003 …..”
We wondered what’s so great about 70 million sales in more than a year compared to one billion downloads every month.
And that produced a comment from the prolific Andrew Nonymous-Coward (what would we do without him : ) here.
He wrote: “One point that keeps on coming up in these articles is the fact that these (so called) ‘legal’ sites keep on ‘rehashing’ the same old 500,000 (or so) songs. By contrast, this site has said many times that over ‘one billion’ songs are ’shared’ per month on p2p networks.
“This is slightly misleading. One could read into these articles that there are over a billion different songs available to p2p users, and that just isn’t true. It would be interesting to know (someone do a study! Quick!!) how many ‘different’ songs are on p2p networks, at any given moment.
“I realize that p2p is great for ‘hard to find’ music, live music, etc. But if one was to compare what is on p2p versus what is on the likes of ‘legal’ sites….I’d be willing to bet that they probably match up, at about 90%.”
We showed the comment to Big Champagne ceo Eric Garland.
Now read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Five Hundred Thousand versus One Billion
By Eric Garland - Big Champagne
This observation is dead on – that comparison is misleading! In the former case, you’re talking about the number of distinct titles, and in the latter, the number of files.
To short-change this excellent reader question just a bit, let’s look just at titles (the variety of music, with no consideration of the popularity of one title over another).
The easy answer is that virtually every title that has ever been popular with any audience, no matter how small, is available at one time or another on p2p networks.
Now, while the volume of files (and interest) is concentrated on a few hundred thousand top titles (many of which are for sale online, and many of which – Beatles, Madonna, Led Zep, etc etc etc – are not) the available title library on a p2p absolutely dwarfs the paid offerings.
In fact, the variety of titles is limited only by the imaginations of every one of the tens of millions of P2P users.
Music is more than the handful of CDs at Best Buy, and p2p ensures that. There are millions of titles in the history of popular music, and quite a few ‘unpopular’ songs as well.
In fact, most of my friends who long ago played music very unsuccessfully in their high school and college days have since found their own obscure compositions on p2p. (Good luck finding those gems on Apple’s iTunes!)
Your readers can demonstrate the disparity quite easily for themselves just by searching for any popular artist on p2p.
As I type this, I’m searching for “Coldplay” and “Sheryl Crow” (to pick a couple of iTunes user faves). The results include at least as many ‘rare’ offerings (unreleased, live, b-side, outtakes) as legitimately-released studio tracks.
Just amplify this phenomenon by every artist you’ve ever seen on p2p networks, and you start to appreciate the challenge. The paid services simply can’t offer “everything” an artist records. P2P networks make a pretty good run at it!
Unfortunately, your reader loses this bet:
> I’d be willing to bet that they probably match up, at about 90%.
The titles on even the best licensed services constitute a small fraction of what’s on P2P networks.
June 15th, 2004 at 3:02 am
Good one.
June 15th, 2004 at 7:58 pm
While 500,000 to one billion isn’t fair, 70 million to 1 billion IS fair. 70 million file transfers from Applie iTunes in a YEAR isn’t even close to 1 billion file transfers over P2P networks in a MONTH. So, P2P ‘wins’ in that regard. And, as pointed out in the above article, P2P also has a much wider selection of music than any of the legal online music services like iTunes, Napster, etc.
June 16th, 2004 at 6:10 am
Who is this ‘Andrew Nonymous-Coward’?? HA! I’d like to meet him someday!
June 16th, 2004 at 6:39 am
Sure, P2P has more files transferred. But look at it this way. Now, I’ve never used a fee based dowload service (Itunes, et. al.) but I bet if I did I’d get the right song in just ONE file transfer.
>>>
June 16th, 2004 at 3:09 pm
I can still easily download genuine mp3’s on the FastTrack network, even though I don’t use that network much anymore. For those of you who left P2P because of the fakes and are now buying music on iTunes, all you have to do is spend about an hour learning about P2P and you can avoid fake files.
It’s either spending an hour or so to learn about P2P, or throwing away your money for DRM infested music files. The choice is yours.
June 22nd, 2004 at 1:22 pm
interesting answer, but it didn’t say what in my opinion was the core question: how many “different songs” are available in p2p-networks? meaning not the number of files (which is over one Billion), but the number of distinct songs! that would be the most interesting point!
July 18th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
away and no new traffic should be forwarded <a href=http://plus.4sex-porn.com/hardcore.html >anal deep lesbian</a> hould generate a removal query. [url=http://plus.4sex-porn.com/hardcore.html]anal deep lesbian[/url]