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Recording Industry's Unexpected Benefit from P2P

Posted by Cliff on from the having-their-cake-and-eating-it-too dept.

Matthew Schultheis writes: "Yahoo / AP is reporting that the record industry is using the files traded on Kazza et al. to track where music is popular. It turns out that they even pay for this information. 'It's the most vast and scalable sample audience that the world has ever seen'" Now if they could only use this data to somehow put out better music...

5 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. Benefitting from a crime... by SUB7IME · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have absolutely no legal background (that statement goes way beyond IANAL), but I'm sort of thinking that benefitting from a crime must be illegal. If the RIAA considers filetrading (of their copyrighted files) to be illegal, and the legal system agrees, then nobody should be using that data to then profit.

    (Just as we do not, for ethical reasons, use information that the Nazis gleaned from their experimentation on the Jews in World War II. Clearly the magnitude is nowhere near the same, but the underlying ethical principle is similar.)

    1. Re:Benefitting from a crime... by mantera · · Score: 5, Interesting


      i don't know why you feel you have to clarify time and again that you do not condone or approve or whatever... the nazis were a product of a situation and an era... the "final solution" if such a thing existed was a result of the age of reason that saw such a course of action as rational... the catholic church and pope weren't even vocal enough about it... now some people continue to deny much of the atrocities and say they were grossly exagerated... i don't know about that, maybe, maybe not... but i know one thing... losers tend to be vilified and winners write history books...

      Just consider for example the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments; google for it... For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 illiterate black men who were lied to and a disease such as syphilis was deliberately allowed to take its awful course on them without treatment. here

      While you're at it you might wanna also google for the CIA mind control experiments during the cold war... they experimented on soldiers and mental patients, gave them high doses of drugs, hundreds of electric shock treatments per individual within a few days... and stuff like that...

      most importantly, had you or the person you responded to been living in nazi germany, you would've probably done the same. Just see the Milgram experiments ... google for them if you don't trust the source

      don't exonerate yourself; given the situation, we're all guilty

  2. Why doesn't an enterprising label..... by ShatteredDream · · Score: 4, Interesting

    work on creating a community site where bands can pay $5-$10 a business quarter to be listed with samples that can be streamed, that connects the bands to venues for say..... 5% of the proceeds and that lets users post comments about the band and rate their music? Then said label gets out of the old business of being a content producer and a service company for musicians providing them everything from merchandising to recording studios to instruments to music software? Basically become a service/product Walmart for musicians and fans as opposed to the current model of milking bands for records.

    --
    Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
  3. Hacking the Tracking by Maestro4k · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Perhaps my mind's a tad devious, but from what I read in the article about how BigChampaigne is operating, the "research" they provide to the record companies is very hackable. It looks like they're tracking requests on the Kazaa network, even if they only track requests to actually download a song (and is this even possible? I'm not up on the technical specifics of how Kazaa's network runs), then all someone needs to do is generate a lot of bogus download requests. No need to actually download anything, just as long as BigChampaigne's software logs the request. A fairly small group of people with access to lots of IP addresses could completely screw the statistics up in short order. Even a home user with DHCP could screw with the stats some, by sending out lots of requests for download on one IP, then requesting a new lease for a new IP. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

    Now there's an idea, we could create a company that indy groups pay to have their songs spike higher in the download charts. Nothing illegal about it (well Kazaa's owners might not like it), since you wouldn't actually download the files. Ahhh, to toy with the minds of the RIAA, it'd be such fun. :)

  4. While we're on this topic by shomon2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A few weeks back I pointed a friend to the creative commons website, so that he could look up information on copyright and see how it was moving forward. He was quite surprised and glad to see that things aren't the way he knew them to be in that area.

    The same happens with musicians. They don't tend to know about this. Especially young, talented people who don't necessarily get much chance to get on the internet. I remember as a teenager I would read in all the music magazines about the dream of one day being signed to a major. Nowadays to me that means mostly negative things - problems. Like a big bank loan and surviving on gigs, giving away your rights etc. But to others the dream goes on.

    Is there a good URL to point people to so that they can get clear concise guidance on why *not* to sign for one of the RIAA companies? Or even that showed what the options are, and examples of people like Ani DiFranco or companies like magnatunes and how to achieve their musical dreams and still avoid bad business decisions.

    The URLs I find are always centred on how bad the RIAA is, or on the consumer side but there isn't to my knowledge a good musician centred site...

    Ale