Does P2P Piracy Actually Help the Music Industry?

With radio using file-sharing stats to develop playlists, people are able to hear music they may actually want to buy.

Seemingly lost in the whole file-sharing debate is how listening to quality new music actually drives consumers to go out and make actual purchases of physical CDs and digital music.

Tired of being force fed stodgy, stale radio conglomerate playlists based on record industry “research” or MTV’s TRL nonsense, some radio stations have taken to playing music playlists based on the tastes of the most avid of music listeners – file-sharers.

We’ve all can agree that music pirates are some of the most voracious audiophiles around, with BitTorrent and other file-sharing programs allowing users to consume music of a number of genres and different artists that would otherwise be impossible to do.

It would simply be cost prohibitive to try and buy and sort through the incessant onslaught of new music released each day. File-sharing allows users to check out a number of artists for free and to quickly and cheaply weed out the good from the bad. This “weeding out” of the good music then shows up in the number of times a file is downloaded and shared on a given BitTorrent tracker site or by the simple degree of availability on a given P2P network

Well, Mediabase, a market-research unit of Clear Channel’s Premiere Radio Networks is working on a venture with BigChampagne, a file-sharing research service, whereby data on the most popular file-sharing music downloads is compiled into a playlist for distribution to radio stations throughout the country.

At any given time the real “pulse” of the music streets can be taken and deliver music to consumers that THEY actually want to hear, that’s based on cold, hard data and not quirky surveys or what music labels are trying to promote.

The new file-sharing research is apparently paying off:

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Huey song “Pop, Lock and Drop It” was in light rotation in April at Power 106, a big Emmis Communications Corp.-owned hip-hop station in Los Angeles, and listeners weren’t requesting it much. The station’s own research on the best music mix to play indicated the song wasn’t catching on with listeners. But data from BigChampagne showed the song was hot on file-sharing networks, including in Los Angeles. Emmanuel “E-man” Coquia, the station’s music director, decided to stick with it. Now, three months later, “Pop, Lock and Drop It” is prominent on the station’s playlist.

Though illegal, file-sharing is an obvious legitimate method for finding music that people want to hear, and ignoring it would simple be foolish. “It’s a fact of life at this time,” says Rich Meyer, Mediabase’s president and executive vice president at Premiere.

However, airplay may also actually contribute to file-sharing downloads, for “When a radio station adds a song, you oftentimes see an immediate bump in downloading activity” in that city, says Rich Meyer, president of Mediabase. Despite this, it’s still the best method around for consumers to discover new music and for record labels to gain exposure for previously unknown artists.

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