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Started by axel, February 08, 2004, 12:44:00 PM

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axel

Have you heard about this? Apparently the music 'biz' now uses P2P sites to observe whats popular:

'You're being tracked

The music industry is using the actions of millions of file sharers to try to find their next hit (in the musical sense). Astonishingly members of the RIAA are actually using illegal file-sharing programs themselves. Monitoring traffic on services, such as KaZaA and Grokster, is providing some of the world's biggest labels with the best information they've ever had on people's reactions to the music heard on radio.

Companies like BigChampagne (www.bigchampagne.com) and Webspins (www.webspins.com) charge record labels from $5 to $40,000 to keep tabs on an album's performance on file-sharing networks. By matching a partial IP to US zip codes, software can determine what's being downloaded.

So when a track is played on a city's radio station these companies can monitor its success (whether people search for it online after hearing it). A recent study in the Atlanta Journal of 500 people in the US found that 44 per cent of young people (18-29) didn't think file sharing was stealing. This confusion isn't helped when record labels start to use file-sharing applications as huge focus groups.

"It shows us what people are doing of their own accord," said a spokesman from Maverick Records, an AOL Time/Warner company. Another spokesman from DreamWorks Records is equally open about its use of illegal MP3 trading. "P2P is a likely distribution channel for our wares. If we're going to be intelligent business people, it behooves us to understand it." Who said hypocrites?'