Civilising the Savages

With news of Kazaa ‘back from the dead’ and the Pirate Bay now a little more mercenary (how long before the name changes to Tariff Bay?), the world of music downloads has lost a few of its high profile superstars to perhaps a misguided strategy that file-sharers will change their spots when cash-for-content becomes the mantra.

Yet despite the best intentions to swing heavy music consumers towards a ‘all-you-can-eat’ subscription model, the world of P2P goes on, swallowing terabytes of data every hour like a deep space vortex, distributing ‘leaks’ at near light speed. Faced with such gravitational pull (and distribution efficiencies), an uneasy truce seems to have descended between parties in these so-called copyright wars.

While legal machinations seem to be giving way to technical monitoring options, there is a measurable rise in deliberate marketing tactics designed to take the sting out of ‘leaks’ through the seeding of free sample tracks, either directly into social media communities or via an established media partner.

Whether you conform to the ‘music is water’ theory, or uphold a solid, unerring position on copyright, the reality of local P2P music download activity holds a simple objective truth: it is pervasive, and involves the vast majority of consumers who regularly attend live music performances, or take an active interest in maintaining a music library of sorts. New, or rehashed payment models bolted onto P2P ‘brands’ will not alter this behaviour in any material way.

Right now almost 78m music tracks are downloaded across Australia each week, with the top track alone, usually a mainstream, high-rotation artist (Black Eyed Peas, for example), recording more than 500,000 downloads on a consistent basis, while a local hip hop group, like Hilltop Hoods (Chase That Feeling), which again has the backing of local radio, might record up to 188,000 downloads. By comparison, an indie group like British India (God is Dead, Meet the Kids), with a much lower rotation, records just over 9,000 downloads.

 Of course, the correlation between airplay and downloads is not that clear cut., or even that strong.

Black Eyed Peas (Boom Boom Pow), for example, records 571,687 downloads concurrently with 271 spins for the week, which equates to 2,109 downloads per spin.  By comparison, Taylor Swift (Love Story) reports 422,780 downloads concurrent with just 18 spins, or 23,487 downloads per spin.

Other artists with high download rates but low spins include: Chris Brown (Forever), 267,982 downloads with five spins; Rihana (Disturbia), 283,557 downloads with seven spins and Dizee Rascal (Dance With Me), 137,585 downloads with just five spins.

Clearly, with so much data on local P2P activity now coming to light, there is still much more to understand about what the download market can define in terms of niche music tastes and what insights they provide to justify this type of analysis becoming an accurate barometer to music trends and, more importantly, emerging stars.