i guess that’s cause most kids are told what to like by MTV, regardless of how they get it, p2p or otherwise.

ah well, at least the crud-majority of stuff that gets shared on p2p isn’t in my face

You can be assured that the industry will be actively poisoning the P2P networks with fake files for most of the top 10 entries. The old “search and download” method is likely to get you a folder full of fakes.

This also may lead to an interesting situation: the more a certain file is spoofed, the more it will be re-searched and re-downloaded – hence the higher it will rise in the chart if BigChampagne’s rankings are based on search requests alone. By comparison, an equally popular Indy track which does not get spoofed would then likely be ranked much lower.

But BigChampagne does indeed browse users’ hard drives. According to the October 2003 Wired article, “BigChampagne can determine that, say, 58 percent of people with a Norah Jones song also have at least one track by John Mayer.” Ironically, the RIAA lawsuits have forced many P2P users to disable file browsing – and even spurring the development of clients like Zultrax which spoof search results to protect users – therefore obstructing the collection of the very same consumer data that they so highly prize.