p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- “Pirated pop keeps stars popular” says a BBC headline, quoting a study from Will Page, chief economist at PRS music royalty collectors, and BigChampagne’s Eric Garland.

The only people not to have figured out file sharing adds up to the greatest kind of free publicity and advertising the world has ever seen are corporate entertainment industry dinosaurs Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music.

“Action against pirate sites has not stopped swappers,” say the two report authors.

Not only but also, “The most pirated acts are likely to be the most popular,” they declare.

You don’t say?

And in more non-news,  Lo! — “the most pirated pop songs tend to be those at the top of the music charts”.

However, although file sharing may be good for the corporate music industry, it doesn’t do much for smaller independent bands, state Page and Garland.

But, Wrong! – says Ernesto on TorrentFreak, continuing »»»

“…  a special brand of ‘pirates’ are particularly interested in new and unsigned bands. On the music tracker What.cd, which hosts almost 100,000 users, the most downloaded album ever is a compilation of unsigned artists. Second is an album from The Flashbulb, with 10 times as many downloads as Britney Spears’ Greatest Hits collection.

Similarly, on the music sharing website Jamendo thousands of artists are giving away their music for free. Rob Costlow, one of the early adopters of the site told TorrentFreak that thanks to this free music model, he is able to make a living off his passion. His most popular album on Jamendo was downloaded over 80,000 times while nearly half a million listened to it on the website.

So, even though the vast majority of the the users of file-sharing services download music from the top of the charts, there is undoubtedly a huge potential for new artists to market themselves through file-sharing. Perhaps less interesting for the major labels who make most money off cleverly marketed top acts, but extremely valuable for the average artist trying to make a living off music.

Meanwhile, “usage on file-sharing sites closely mirrors that on legitimate music sites,” say Page and Garland in the Beeb story, also noting, “There was no evidence of the Long Tail operating”.

The Long Tail argument was coined by Wired’s Chris Anderson in 2004, and detailed in his book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8).

Writing in TechDirt, “the conclusion seems to be that the Long Tail theory doesn’t hold, because the most popular music on file-sharing networks is also the most popular music in the charts,” says Carlo Longino, going on »»»

Maybe we’ve been misunderstanding this Long Tail thing all along, but a big part of it is acknowledging the hits. You don’t ignore them, rather you also pay attention to the long tail of less popular items. It makes sense that the file-sharing download charts parallel music sales charts, since they’re largely tracking the same market; this also reinforces the point that the music industry’s claims about the impact of piracy on sales are overblown (after all, if so many people are downloading certain tracks, one wouldn’t expect them to sell so well).

The study also says the Long Tail fails because “there is too much choice on file-sharing sites” and it’s difficult for people to find new music. Again, this reinforces, rather than undermines the Long Tail, which requires a strong recommendation system to succeed. But the file-sharing services themselves aren’t recommendation systems, nor are they intended to be. The recommendation systems are blogs, net radio, word of mouth, and other sources; the file-sharing networks are just the distribution network. It sounds like this study actually does more to assert the validity of the Long Tail than refute it, and it also does very little to help make the case that file-sharing is destroying the music business.

But, Longino adds, “that, of course, wouldn’t be the message the PRS wants to deliver — so it sets up the straw man that if the Long Tail is wrong, then file sharing must be bad.

“Only problem is it doesn’t even do that well.”

Follow p2pnet on Twitter.

BBC – Pirated pop keeps stars popular, May 14, 2009
TorrentFreak – Shocking: Pirates Like Britney Spears Too, May 14, 2009
TechDirt – PRS-Backed Study On File Sharing At Pains To Deliver The Wanted Conclusions, May 14, 2009