p2pnet.net News:- We’ve cited Big Champagne statistics numerous times to point up the differences between ‘facts’ from the entertainment industry on the fanciful corporate music download businesses, and what’s happening in the real world of online music, which is to say the p2p networks.

The differences are in orders of magnitude. Can they possibly be accurate?

Yes, Big Champagne ceo Eric Garland promises.

p2pnet: What, bottom line, does Big Champagne do?

Garland: Big Champagne gathers information about activity on all of the most populous/popular p2p file sharing networks by large-scale participation in those networks.

p2pnet: How do you manage that?

Garland: The process involves passive observation of what users are downloading to shared directories, sharing over time, and what they’re searching for - all recorded and analyzed continually. Our systems are constantly monitoring activity globally, and have been doing so for more than four years.

p2pnet: Do you study just a few of the bigger sites, or all of them?

Garland: The networks included in Big Champagne’s reporting support or under gird virtually all of the most popular p2p applications.

p2pnet: Such as ….?

Garland: Big Champagne’s core database includes information about activity on the original Napster network, the Scour Exchange, AudioGalaxy, Fasttrack (originally popularized by the Morpheus client and later, Kazaa), Donkey, gnutella. We also collect information about Warez usage trends, and about torrents, and we’ve profiled a number of smaller communities (Soulseek, for instance) as well.

p2pnet: Do you actually have digital files on your servers?

Garland: No. Big Champagne doesn’t host content.

p2pnet: Do you have any kind of role in what the entertainment inudustry likes to call pirate-busting - for example, do you know the identities of file-sharers?

Garland: No. We don’t participate in any kind of anti-piracy activity whatsoever. Nor do we try to identify individuals. Big Champagne is a purely a measurement firm and as such, we’re concerned only with observing how content on p2p proliferates and is sought over time at a population level for the purposes of market analysis.

p2pnet: So how do you do what you do?

Garland: While the specific method of measuring activity on different p2p networks varies according to differences among those systems, in all cases Big Champagne is connecting to logged-on users, recording information - in the public domain of the p2p environment, mind you - constantly, 24/7.

Big Champagne systems time-stamp activity on p2p to the millisecond, continually, on a massive scale on multiple networks, as they’ve done since October, 2000. In concept, our data collection methodology is similar to that of any popular search engine’s method of indexing the public world wide web.

The amount of time spent communicating with each user is very little; the system scales very elegantly without causing traffic congestion for users or the network in general. Generally, in the course of data collection, Big Champagne doesn’t download complete files from users (or upload anything without permission, for that matter). In multiple NOCs, Big Champagne maintains multiple high speed connections to Tier 1 ISP backbones around the clock. We use dynamic, simultaneous, direct monitoring presences on key network nodes. Through each node, we’re connected to tens of thousands of additional locations at any moment. Big Champagne monitors billions of online searches and files.

Big Champagne communicates across the p2p network, making use of the very purpose of these systems - to publish information about files sought and shared and facilitate the exchange of this information among users.

p2pnet: Do you do anything other than simply measure and report the data?

Garland: Yes. Big Champagne analyzes and reports on the popularity of online media at the individual title level, in granular close-up. We’ve spent years refining, improving, and expanding our systems, and years developing analytical processes that make sense of this torrent of “raw” information as it is received.

When BigChampagne takes the activity observed on p2p and plots this information over time, it plots the wax and wane of the popularity of any given title on p2p systems. We also observe and record search activity, again with significant differences from network to network, although search activity is not factored into the charts you see on p2pnet)

By definition, Big Champagne reports only on what we can observe across p2p systems. We’re not concerned with file sharing that occurs via email, IM, private servers and so forth. Further, we’re not concerned with kids in school swapping CDRs full of mp3s, or dumping the contents of their iPods onto each other’s computers.

Having said that, BigChampagne also has reporting relationships with commercial radio airplay monitoring companies, traditional retail sales monitoring companies, and a growing number of online retailers and paid download sites that are feeding information into our systems for use in more diversified chart reporting, as we expand and diversify our offerings.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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