File sharing is booming
p2pnet.net News:- The entertainment industry, with the Big Five record labels and major movie studios to the fore, is one of the wealthiest corporate sectors in the world. And yet it’s in deep trouble, or so it says, the latest bleatings emenating from Big Music spokesman Mitch Bainwol.
But if that’s the case – if there is indeed suffering and terrible hardship, and huge financial losses – why isn’t industry representing its investors and the people who work for it to the best of its abilities, using the burgeoning world of online digital distribution as its major recovery tool?
The Net is awash with plastic corporate music sites selling the same tired cookie-cutter ‘product’ made and supplied by the Big Five but none of them, including Apple’s much-vaunted iTunes, are even close to tapping the enormous potential offered by digital downloads.
In fact, they’re not tapping it at all.
Last month, 8,324,299 people were on p2p networks at any given moment with one billion files (at a conservative estimate) moving among computers around the world.
The figures come from Big Champagne ceo Eric Garland who told p2pnet that in May, 9,279,585 were online at any one time and in April, the figure was 9,473,785.
If the entertainment industry would get the message and use p2p for sales and marketing – as Mike Robertson is doing with Linspire – it would dramatically improve returns for its investors.
Instead, it spends untold millions trying to defeat the undefeatable – downloading and file sharing.
However, more and more people are logging on and it won’t be long before the Net is the principal means of communciation around the world.
With that in mind, if music, movies and software were sold and distributed inexpensively online, there’d be very little physical product. There’d be a massive drop, certainly, but it wouldn’t be in sales. Rather, you’d see a significant reduction of overhead, distribution, manufacturing, and legal costs, illicit CD/ DVD operations would wither and there’d be a concomitant reduction in the pirate problem – the real one, not the fake one involving ordinary people who share online.
In the meanwhile, it’s all happening online, as the Big Champagne figures below prove. And one of these days the entertainment industry will come out of the tunnel into the light.
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Big Champagne: Internet File Tracking
Users online at a given moment |
| January, 2004 | 8,767,241 | June, 2003 | 6,818,050 |
| February, 2004 | 8,888,768 | July, 2003 | 6,534,110 |
| March, 2004 | 9,453,940 | August, 2003 | 6,294,525 |
| April, 2004 | 9,473,785 | September, 2003 | 7,399,311 |
| May, 2004 | 9,279,585 | October, 2003 | 8,759,051 |
| June, 2004 | 8,324,299 | November, 2003 | 7,680,854 |
| December, 2003 | 8,671,136 |
July 15th, 2004 at 11:22 pm
BigChampagne only compiles user population data from sources that offer this ability. Just like the vast number of Iraqis killed in the Seinfeldian ‘War About Nothing’ that were undocumented, the real number of P2P users online is higher, probably much higher.
Millions of people download from newsgroups and irc and go uncounted. As do all the AIM/instant message users. There are also smaller networks, there are private servers/channels/hubs. There are p2p apps and services that only share within a local LAN network. (ideal for file-hungry but increasingly-restricted university accounts) All of the users of these P2P methods form a second tier of P2P: the vast uncounted file sharer population.
SneakerNet
And with the ease of burning CDs these days, the unmonitored “sneaker-net” has exploded. Gone are the old days when making a copy for a friend meant spending 40 minutes taping a scratched LP. Now perfect digital copies can be made in less than a tenth of the time – and for a fraction of the material cost. Unlike cassettes, each new CD generation can be copied indefinitely. The sneakernet helps make up for the quality shortfall of downloaded music: lossy formats with quality too poor to warrant a permanent archive. If Big Music had any idea of just how many people now share burned CDs, this just might be their worst nightmare come true. In the 1980s, BM declared nuclear war on digital audio tape (DAT) and won, and now a similar situation exists with copied CDs that gets a smaller portion of BM’s attention since the start of the P2P revolution. Yet the sneakernet may well be the largest unofficial “P2P network”.