RIAA Uses P2P for More Than Just Suing Users

We all know that the major lable music industry is screaming to lawmakers and courts that peer-to-peer filesharing networks like Kazaa and Grokster are cutting into their profits, costing them millions and millions of dollars as people trade music online for free.

It turns out that those money-grubbing assholes at the RIAA are actually using peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa and Grokster to determine what the next big hit should be and to figure out a new artist's best target audience in order to sell more CDs.

That's right; the same people that the RIAA has been suing for copyright infringement are being used as a test audience to help the RIAA sell more music. The company that's helping them do it is called BigChampagne.

On top of tracking who swaps what from what location, BigChampagne also searches the libraries of everyone who's online. If a new artist starts to gain fans, you can tell what else those fans listen to-- whether your new Lindsay Lohan is a bigger hit with teen girls or with their moms, whether it makes sense to push a new singer-songwriter through Starbucks, and on and on. Compare this to a few years ago, when you could sell a record to someone at a store and not even know what other albums they bought that day; now, entire libraries are laid bare and ready for dissection.

"You can get a really good psychographic profile of a listener base by just looking at the collections of people who download this or that," says [Eric] Garland [of BigChampagne], "And that becomes tremendously important, because early in the life of a record, labels don't necessarily know who the audience is. They just know they've got something great."

Of course, the same industry that's paying to watch people steal music just went to the Supreme Court to stop them from doing it. When BigChampagne opened, record execs often hired them covertly, or even took meetings across the street from the office to ensure that nobody knew what they were doing. Some labels feared that paying BigChampagne would legitimize filesharing, or even hurt the legal actions they were taking against Napster and its successors.

Don't actions like hiring BigChampagne and using data gathered from peer-to-peer networks as a marketing tool undermine the RIAA's claims that filesharing is hurting the industry, as well as the lawsuits the RIAA keeps mercilessly bringing against peer-to-peer filesharers?

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