Jari Ketola
18 Nov 2003 12:55
Even though the music industry has little to gain from P2P piracy, there's still some aspects to it they find worth paying for. One of them is P2P search and download statistics.
Major labels, such as Warner Bros., Disney and Atlantic Records buy P2P usage statistics from BigChampagne, a company that has been monitoring for instance Kazaa since 2000. BigChampagne monitors, for instance, how many times their customers' artists show up on search strings, how often their songs are shared and how many times they are downloaded. The record labels can use the statistics for instance to determine which artists are popular in certain areas, and direct their marketing accordingly.
BigChampagne doesn't record the user names of people sharing files, but does use the IP addresses to analyze the geographic location of the users. Gathering statistics always involves the question of privacy, but P2P users sharing and downloading copyrighted material are hardly in the position to complain.
Source:
Yahoo.com