At Perceptric we are preparing a report on the content and technology sectors to be released sometime soon, and tentatively entitled: “Insights into Australia’s changing relationship with content as a result of the impact of digital technology”.
Yes, I know it is a pretty dry title. None of the sexiness of a snappy headline from the Daily Telegraph. Have to work on that.
But here is the thing:
As part of the research into P2P activity in Australia that Tom Koltai has been doing in putting together the econometric data for the report, we looked at a number of Australian music acts and AC/DC was one of them. What was interesting about AC/DC was that they had a new album out during the period we were researching, which was after a long dry spell. There were also a number of TV programs that supported the album release. And perhaps, more importantly AC/DC, alongside the Beatles is one of the only major acts that I can think of where you can’t buy the band’s music as a digital download.
I am sure that the band and the label have what they think is a perfectly good reason for that. But perhaps what they don’t understand fully is that once you have a digital copy in existence somewhere in the world (i.e. on a hard drive of a computer), it is inevitable that the music finds its way into torrents and starts getting shared with millions.
None of this is probably surprising to you.
What may be of interest, though, is that there are a phenomenal number of seeders in the torrent world who are offering not just a track or an album by AC/DC but the entire 31 CD AC/DC album catalogue! It is 2.44GB and on one torrent site there were literally thousands of seeders offering the file when we checked over the last weekend:
So, just to be clear here, this is the full discography of the band offered as one downloadable file.
But wait, there’s more:
Some enterprising individual has gone to the trouble of adding to the file photos of the band, the album covers and live mp3’s of the band, so you have the option of downloading that as an alternative. It is 2.99GB. There are hundreds offering this option.
Now let’s face it, the band is probably not going to feel the pinch from torrents that are being downloaded. They have enough millions to last several lifetimes, I would imagine. And certainly, Alberts, my old employer, has made more money from AC/DC than I can possibly imagine.
But wouldn’t you think that the band, the record company, the management, the lawyers and everyone else involved would get the reality that iTunes only represents at most 4%of the downloads that take place on line.
And more than 50% of the total web traffic is P2P traffic according to the statistics.
The fact that AC/DC doesn’t provide legitimate paid-for download makes the data on the torrent offerings just that little bit more interesting for me.
But the bottom line is the same. Digital content is a gypsy. It like to travel far and wide. The AC/DC catalogue proves it.
