Jul 09
11
Who Is Driving P2P Downloads?
If you have a look at the chart that is featured below you will immediately see that there is a lot of repetition. The same artists appear again and again, and the same titles appear multiple times, often with different mixes that differentiate them, but sometimes as slightly different versions that may have a difference in the text that identifies them…
There are a number of interesting aspects to this.
The first is obvious: When an artist is 'hot' people start downloading lots of their stuff. So the meme of the artist may start with the song that is on the radio right now – and I mean right now – because we are seeing a very direct correlation between what is being played in real time and what is being downloaded. So there is a clear call to action between a traditional media event and an online P2P reaction to that event. In other words, consumers want immediate gratification. Ironically that doesn't mean necessarily that they want to listen to the piece of music right now – it is almost as if they want to initiate the download while they are thinking about it so that they can listen later.
Once they are involved in downloading one song, quite naturally, they start looking for other titles by the same artist. What they specifically choose to download then becomes quite interesting, and Tom has done quite a lot of work on building up a theorem of hedonistic value together with a algorithm that hopefully unravels the real popularity of a piece of content. Hence the construction of the chart.
The second and almost as obvious piece of information you get from the chart is that there is a very clear correlation between the number of mixes available for a song and the amount it is downloaded. The more mixes available the more popular the title and the higher it appears on the chart – in all of its various forms. The concept of providing multiple mixes of a track in order to satisfy multiple niche markets is not something new. The music business has been doing this for at least a decade. What is new(ish), as we have blogged about recently, is that now we are seeing a lot of consumer created re-mixes. So when a record company provides material as part of its general release strategy that makes for relatively easy remix when integrated with the tools that are available, this really does drive the download sector quite rapidly.
Now the thing that would not be obvious to the casual observer, which is really interesting is that pretty much whenever you see a piece of content on line it has a 'signature' on it. This is the 'handle' of the person that originally ripped that piece of content. One of the more famous ones is Axxo – there are a lot of movie rips by Axxo, who may be one person, or may be a number of people. But the signature of the person who ripped the content and then first seeded it tends to give an indication of the quality of the rip. Some people take great care to ensure that their rips are of the best quality: high bit rate, no drop outs, etc.
The person that originally rips the piece of content also attaches a whole bunch of metadata to the ripped file. Hence you get the song name and the artist name and a whole bunch of other information that may be of use to the downloader. There are patterns to how this information is presented and what the ensuing popularity of a song tends to be.
Now a quick digression – which I think is important and relevant. The company that has famously worked for the record industry in the US is called Media Defender. (I am not providing a link to their site. I don't choose to give them the benefit of the additional googlejuice – If you want to check you will find them). On their web site they list the two business models under which they operate: The first is to act as the police force for the music/content industry and releasing spoof files dressed up to look like the real thing but containing spurious material that may include malware, white noise or other non-relevant material. The second is to act as a marketing agent using P2P to increase awareness of an artist or a piece of content on a geographic basis.
So imagine if you will how this plays out, because it actually has quite a lot of relevance to our chart.
Spoof files are obvious – The transfer of these files is taking up a huge amount of the bandwidth of the internet. So the faster that these files are identified and deleted from hard drives the better it will be for everyone who is online. And responsible P2P users are very active in deleting these files, I believe. In fact I would go so far as to say that there are a lot of people who are so passionate about there being “good” files out there that they take a lot of time to rip the same titles that they see as being offered spuriously in order to ensure that the good files are shared rather than the bad. That actually has the reverse effect to that which the music industry intends. It motivates the passionate P2Per into action.
The other is quite interesting and worthy of some thought. This is where P2P networks are used as a marketing tool. This takes us back to the issue of metadata and/or handle. There are a number of identifying names that you see again and again attached to files that indicate who originally ripped them. When you start to look at the number of remixes of certain artists that were ripped by the same names, you start to realize that it would be impossible for one person to have ripped the files. There are just too many.
If you scratch a little deeper it is possible to also determine where the original seeded file actually entered the network. When you get to this level of granularity you conclude that some (and perhaps quite a lot) of the music that is in P2P networks joined the network at the same place geographically and because of the sheer volume of material was probably seeded by multiple people at that one geographic location. This seems to indicate that the seeding of these files is quite probably part of a marketing plan, of the kind hinted at in the brief overview of Media Defender's second business model.
So that is what we are seeing on the charts. This week has been quite anomalous because of the volume of download requests for Michael Jackson content. But as a general rule we are seeing a lot of the download traffic being deliberately marketing focused. Now one has to assume that Media Defender does not have a bunch of geeks sitting around ripping content for fun. They are in it for the money. So that means that either the record company or the artist via their managers are using companies like Media Defender to deliberately seed content onto P2P networks. This is also hinted at by the positioning within the text description of a song of the title and the artist. There is a pattern…
So what we have here that you may want to think about is the following:
1. The music companies tell the world that their business is being destroyed by P2P and sue people for uploading content.
2. The music companies hire companies to seed content on P2P networks in order to build presence for their artists.
How Orwellian is that?!!
So what this now tells us is that new independant artists have an opportunity to build market presence by following the same logic as the majors – because frankly this information is the key differentiator right now in terms of market dynamics for the music business.
Right now the major music companies, by stealth, are outmarketing the independant small operators, by giving music away to some, in order to sell it to others who they have convinced it is evil to get it for free.
They get the major artist managers to play the game by demonizing downloads and at the same time they are giving away those same artist's tracks…. A neat shell game. Not to mention the fact that they get all the geeks out there thinking that they are following the rock'n'roll spirit by sharing music, and in so doing they just keep building the visibility of the artists that the music companies are trying to build…. Fascinating…