A universe of options
p2pnet.net News Feature:- We’ve been running a weekly File Share Top Ten for quite a while now and we recently added a Movies File Share Top Ten. Soon, we’ll be launching a monthly Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze download awards.
The statistics used in these charts are from p2p research company Big Champagne and they appear only in p2pnet. We run them because, as USA TODAY’s Edna Gundersen sums it up, “With infinite capacity and far-flung communication links, the Internet has opened a universe of options to music enthusiasts”.
We wanted to show what’s really happening as opposed to what the members of the Big Four record label cartel say is happening.
“Peer into the depths of cyberspace and a big-bang picture unfolds,” says Gundersen. “It’s a phenomenon the music business has yet to capitalize on …”
And that’s because Big Music’s disingenuous claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the activity is on the p2p networks, and the p2p networks alone. There, hundreds of millions of digital files of all kinds – movies and music included – move around every hour.
“While paid downloads skyrocketed to 140.9 million tracks in 2004 from 19.2 million in the last half of 2003 (no earlier figures are available), unauthorized file-sharing dwarfs purchases,” says USA TODAY. “Since mid-2003, 19 billion [our emphasis] peer-to-peer transactions have occurred, predominantly current hits. But new sounds and new bands are emerging from Web cabals, a blow to radio and labels used to setting the agenda.”
Great big megaphone
Gundersen quotes Big Champagne ceo Eric Garland as saying, “We’re seeing a clear and consistent pattern of some acts being championed by online communities and later embraced by traditional media outlets.
“Nothing works like word of mouth, and online word of mouth is a great big megaphone. Instead of being able to tell two or three friends, you have entire Web rings of like-minded people quick to pass along recommendations.”
Earlier in the year, the Big Music cartel’s IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industries) claimed paid-for downloads had risen more than tenfold to over 200 million, the implication being that the 230 sites are selling tracks like hot-cakes.
However, there is, to all intents and purposes, only one site. The 200 million (now 300 million) tracks waved by the IFPI are 99.9% iTunes sales, and they’ve accumulated since the site went up the year before last.
Three hundred million seems like a lot, even spread over several years, but in the real world of online music where the p2p networks rule, it amounts to nothing. The number of people logged on simultaneously at any minute of any day grew to nearly 10 million in April 2004, a 30% increase from the same period a year earlier, says an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study. And upwards of one billion songs are moving computer-to-computer every month, says p2p research firm Big Champagne.
Big Music’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) says its sue ‘em all campaign is making an appreciable dent in file sharing. However, various academic and other studies prove that far from being intimidated by the RIAA, more and more people are sharing files every day.
Big Champagne stats say globally, on average, in February last year, 6,831,366 people were logged onto the p2p networks at any given moment, and that in the US, the figure was 4,039,989. The same figures for February, 2005, show this has risen substantially to 8,524,938 globally, and 6,183,636 for the US.
This is changing not only how people get their music fixes, but also from whom they’re getting them.
As Gundersen points out, John Mayer’s rise, “benefited from feverish swapping of mp3 files, the modern equivalent of tape-trading”.
His ‘Daughters’ is currently #9 in this week’s p2pnet Rock Top Ten, up from #10 last week.
Crucial to luring youth dollars
Norah Jones reached Big Champagne’s top 10 before she got significant airplay and the O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Garden State soundtracks popped at Champagne months before cracking Billboard, says Gundersen, quoting Garland as saying he’s convinced every known piece of recorded music is available somewhere online, and that growing awareness of the inventory is gradually changing consumer habits.
Gundersen also hits THE important nail on the head, perhaps for the first time by a mainstream media outlet: “Unlike iTunes or Napster, enthusiast sites place community above commerce, earning credibility and loyalty that are crucial to luring youth dollars. That’s one of the sticky challenges facing an industry that alienated downloaders with steep CD prices and piracy lawsuits.”
As Cherry Lane Digital ceo Jim Griffin said recently, the labels, “cling to their pursuit of this notion of control and calling those who do not comply thieves, and in doing so they leave billions on the table that should be divided fairly amongst creators and rights holders.”
She says the war against file-sharers continues with the March 29 Supreme Court hearing when the entertainment industry will for the third time try to have lower-court decisions that p2p companies are not responsible for what their users do with the applications they sell, overturned.
However, this ‘war’ is all in the mind of the entertainment industry. P2p is here to stay. The people, those whom the entertainment inindustry is trying to sue into buying ‘product,’ have spoken, and loudly.
When the various corporate interests finally figure out they’re operating in the digital 21st century and not the physical 1970s, the phony war will be over – until the next technological changes such as ultra-high-capacity storage and holographic media, perhaps, again threaten the corporate status quo.
Not only niche fans
USA TODAY has Big Champagne co-founder Joe Fleischer saying, “Certainly, copyright infringement and piracy are problems. But the very nature of computing is peer-to-peer, and no matter what happens, this type of activity will continue and grow. The lawsuits had an impact and made people aware that risk was involved.”
What was the result?
“Now users are more secretive and 10 or 20 steps ahead (of the security measures)” and the major labels haven’t learned how to serve rabid niche fans, who learned to serve themselves, says Fleischer.
However, not only niche fans are rabid.
Thousands of new people are going online every day meaning for the first time in history, ‘we’ have a voice ‘they’ have to listen to. Eventually, the entertainment industry will be forced to acknowledge its customers as active participants rather than mindless cash-cows.
Moreover, the companies and governments forget the people they’re suing are also the ones who are conceiving, developing, servicing and administering the very systems which keep the wheels turning and the money coming in.
Think about it.
In the meanwhile, what’s really interesting abut the USA TODAYpiece isn’t what’s being said. It is, after all, nothing new.
Look, though, at who’s saying it. It’s been a long time since a news outlet of USA TODAY’s ilk did more than simply parrot entertainment industry puff pieces as if they came from credible sources.
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
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See:-
USA TODAY – Music fans reach for the stars, March 9, 2005
more than tenfold – The Digital Music Revolution, p2pnet, January 19, 2005
the phony war – The Digital Music Revolution, p2pnet, January 19, 2005
March 10th, 2005 at 8:25 pm
I don’t get it.. why don’t they break this wide open.. they don’t seem to get the idea that fair use is important.. that open standards are important for the viability of computers, and for preserving true freedom of choice between platforms.
They don’t understand that people don’t like being micromanaged by paranoid and disconnected corporations, and that they know they have rights to time shift, space shift, transform, duplicate, and format shift media so long as it’s in their own home.
Until they dump DRM there will be no parity between an itunes or crapster file and one comming from a p2p network.
March 11th, 2005 at 1:14 am
“Whats really happening”, re: Your download charts.
The unending bitching and moaning about the ‘evils’ of the MPAA and the RIAA has reached a point of absolute absurdity.
You (the consumer who believes the ‘PR hype’ put out by these organisations and their members) are foolish enough to want the crap their peddling. In subscribing to the machine and wanting their product you not only give them the power to behave like this, but a tick in the checkbox that they are getting ’stolen’ from. If you couldn’t download the file, you’d still want it and, therefore, quite possibly pay for it.
Stop buying the crap they feed you in trailers, marketing, print ads and we’ll all stop having to deal with the ‘legality’ of ‘wanting’ their product for the cost of an internet connection.
Digital Downloader’s who moan about the danger’s and restrictions organisations (like the two mentioned above) are trying to put on our internet usage are no better than folk who sue McDonald’s because they scolded themselves on obviously hot coffee.
Idiots.
March 11th, 2005 at 2:35 am
…we’d still have AM radio as the only other medium to newspapers.
I don’t think they’re doing too badly out of technologial innovation.
March 11th, 2005 at 3:56 am
Scolded themselves? I’ve been a very, very, bad boy. Shame on me.
You mean Scalded!
March 11th, 2005 at 9:21 am
Cute.
Is that the only response? There were more spelling and gramatical errors in my comment… why stop there?
Or is that the most valid reply you could give?
March 11th, 2005 at 1:17 pm
I have always bought my music from the stores. Now that I have ’seen the light’ about what the cartels are doing to people, I no longer do this. It is all download for me.
By the way, much of the independent stuff out there sounds better than the stuff peddled by the cartels.
March 24th, 2007 at 7:11 pm