Music Ally

In the first of a five part series on how internet intelligence can be used to create new metrics for measuring music, we speak to Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne. Founded in 2000, BigChampagne started by monitoring filesharing activity but now works with record labels and movie studios measuring numerous types of entertainment usage.

Eric’s comments can be found as part of an extensive feature analysing the market for music metrics, alongside observations from other leaders in the field including executives from WaveMetrix and Nielsen BuzzMetrics. To read the feature, log in or sign up for a free trial of the Music Ally Report. And continue reading after the jump for Eric Garland’s fascinating insights into the world of digital music metrics.

We’ve been following Big Champagne for nearly a decade – so how have you developed in that time?

Before we married filesharing with radio there was a time when we we were just looking at filesharing in isolation. Then our mission became to incorporate all the emerging forms of enjoying / acquiring music because the established forms were not available to us. We focused on the bit that was available to us as a new company and over time our hair has gone grey!

We’re not as young or as new or unfamiliar and in some ways I say this guardedly because I’m always wary of the subtext of saying we’re becoming a more traditional media metrics company because that isn’t necessarily something to boast about. But most of what we do now is aggregate and analyse info about the sale, broadcast and all manner of internet exploitation of popular music.

We have information provided to us by every major media company, concert promoters, broadcasters, social networks…we work directly with Myspace, with Amazon, with iTunes and in other words we’re now less in the business of trying to bring attention to non-standard or non-traditional metrics and more in the business of trying to sew together strategically all the ways – some transactional, some soft marketing some impressions – all of these different venues where music is enjoyed…and trying to give our customers a currency.

You’ve also been doing some data manipulation work for labels – can you tell us more?

That’s a new aspect where media companies outsource to us some not-so-sexy back office functions around manipulating and distributing business intelligence. The announcement came this summer about a long term deal that we did with UMG here, which was mostly about consolidating lots of non-standard platforms and repositories for internal metrics and get it into our BC platforms.

Earlier you mentioned giving customers a currency – do you mean when you use that term?

I’ve taken to using that word deliberately because it tends to suggest a standard increment of measure. The Neilsen company or Arbitron or the Official Charts or Music Control… they create currencies and so we work in close partnership with all of the links in the distribution chain to create a repository for a common measure and a platform for managing these data and turning them into real business intelligence.

Labels sometimes tell us that they feel uncomfortable with the internet because they feel it can’t be measured, while they are totally happy with the metrics around TV. How do you explain this phenomenon?

I hear that every day practically from brands because increasingly we work with brands and ad agencies – I hear it a great deal as we have a nascent little business with a similar set of services in film and TV – so I address that concern in almost every meeting.

The cute answer is that of course we all know that internet distributors are better empirically suited for close measurement – to give an example when Hulu streams TV programmes over internet there is more and better data about the reach, attention, audience consumption…in fact every point of metadata is more verifiable, more bona fide, better.

But to give an analogy, the patient does have a valid complaint but they haven’t been to medical school so they don’t know how to articulate that complaint. It’s about how you get from the presenting need to the underlying need.

What I feed back is that maybe the issue is not that you can’t measure on the internet but that we’re in such an early stage of this market that there are no accepted standards.

I point out that broadcasters, TV people, film people themselves often say how terribly flawed the methodology for quantifying the traditional audiences is – people say things like “Neilsen homes are terrible”, or “it’s based on diary keeping”…I just remind them that even though we know it’s not perfect it’s still the currency. How is internet servicing us less well? The currency and standards have not yet emerged.

Could Big Champagne be the company to set these standards?

I wish I still thought I had the hubris and youth and naiveté to think that an organisation like mine could be responsible for stepping in and creating the currency for measurement. It will be a collaborative effort that requires the buy-in and measurement of parties around the circle – it’s an incremental service. We think because we got started so early we have made a great deal of headway – we have formal relationships with virtually all of the required parties, we are all holding hands which is the first step….but the next step is getting agreement about benchmarks.

The buzzword things are the ones that will be the hardest to reach consensus around – engagement, word of mouth and so on. The things we are quite confident in are the things that are non-controversial: all of the transaction-based data such as a purchase, a purchase price, a view, a partial view what constitutes a view versus a partial view… once everyone has agreed that at the platform level in cooperation with Spotify or Myspace Music that we are going to establish these universally-accepted standards then new media leapfrogs past traditional media in your ability to audit and say with authority ‘this was the audience for this piece of media’ whereas in a traditional marketplace even when people buy and leave with something in a bag you don’t have a retraceable path – there’s a lot of tracework and projection.

Isn’t it the case though that even in digital retail, currently a lot of labels don’t know exactly who is buying their music on iTunes as it happens?

I think the labels have every right to assume that their own access to data and the quality and timeliness of it is going to improve dramatically in short order. That’s one of the few things that provided this completely unanticipated windfall for us…the day the iTunes issue was first brought to our attention was almost a day of celebration for our offices because we didn’t realise it….it seemed like a ridiculous problem and it’s not, it’s a very real problem.

It’s not one that has an easy answer, it doesn’t lay itself to laying blame as easily as you might think. Although the retailers arguably have a fiduciary responsibility, this kind of reporting is not a core competency for digital retailers and it is a cost centre. It’s not in the end much more than an obligation and an expensive one and so strategically it’s very hard to get a retailer to prioritise and care about it. Thank God for that, says BigChampagne, because that is what we do.

What do you make of the new generation of online measurement services for music?

They make me profoundly nostalgic. I loved building this business and there’s no more exciting and fun time than when you’re inventing something that didn’t exist. Now we’re doing the important job of delivering on the promises made, but blazing that trail is a great pleasure for an entrepreneur. Seeing the emergence of these companies is validating for us because it looks like there is a sector.

The silly thing is that almost everyone agreed we would be short-lived. As I was told at South by Southwest in March of 2000 when Napster had been shut, I was told we would not be in the business a year later and it was too bad because I seemed like a nice guy – so it’s exciting to see that not only has this become a real sector but there are a couple of generations of companies expanded on a mandate that we’d like to think we helped create.

So it’s good, for the tide lifts all boats. The valuations of all of our companies are improving by the quarter in tough times and in part because so many VCs have said we think this is a hot sector. I guess specifically my reaction to seeing these companies is there’s a little bit of relief in that we’ve been asked along the way to be all things to all elements of the business and in more recent years to a variety of entertainment businesses – film companies and TV companies and executives at gaming companies all saying ‘you need to get into this area’.  No company, especially not a startup, can shoulder that and there’s some areas we’ve known for some time that we didn’t intend to be pushed into but we feared we’d pushed into. We can now say: ‘you’re looking for Artist Data Systems’ or ‘You’re looking for Bandmetrics’.

One of those things, for example, is mapping the spidered or scraped social net for all bands everywhere. That has never been our charter and never would have been – it’s a gaping hole in the marketplace and now there seems to be some strong entrants, some real competition, so in that sense I’m relieved.

We want to know what every artist is doing in a proprietary way – we want to build that database but we don’t want to build an inexpensive low cost scraped or spidering capabilities so that we can allow every aspiring artist singing in every shower to have what he’s entitled to use which is a free toolset for tracking his own progress.

Another great web property is what WeAreHunted has done – for us it was forever on a whiteboard, we were forever saying ‘what about doing b2c, trying to create something for consumers along the lines of filtering and discovery…?’ and you always have grand designs when you’re in a data business and had we ten lifetimes we would have done some of them.

Tags: bigchampagne, Eric Garland, marketing effectiveness, measurements, measuring, metrics, monitoring, music, P2P

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 9:15 am and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.