Music Ally

Earlier this week, the RIAA published a blog post slamming the news that the Hope For Haiti Now charity album was freely available on BitTorrent sites.

“The posting highlights a truly ugly side of P2P piracy – the undermining of humanitarian fundraising efforts via online theft of the “Hope for Haiti Now” compilation. So much for the notion that illegal downloading (”sharing”) is an effort to help advance the plight of artists.”

But reading that, I wondered just how popular the album is on file-sharing networks. It might be available, but how many people are downloading it? So I asked someone best placed to answer that question – Eric Garland of BigChampagne, which tracks activity on these networks.

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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.

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Music Ally has confirmed a number of leading international figures as part of its digital sessions at next month’s Great Escape music convention in Brighton. The convention takes place from 14-16 May with all Music Ally sessions taking place on Friday 15 May. Speakers include Spotify founder Daniel Ek, BigChampagne’s CEO Eric Garland and YouTube’s Patrick Walker.

Leading industry figures also taking part in Music Ally sessions include Sony’s Fred Bolza and Seb Weller, and Simply Red manager Ian Grenfell. Sessions include another infamous Music Ally trial in which we put labels in the dock and ask how relevant they are and a hypothetical artist case study marketing session.

Full details can be found on the official Great Escape website.

Figures shared with Music Ally by tracking firm BigChampagne reveal that more than 445,000 people illegally downloaded U2’s No Line On The Horizon album in the two-week period between 18th February and 3rd March from BitTorrent.

The chart supplied by the company shows the spike in downloads following the album’s leak in February, apparently due to it being accidentally made available for sale on an Australian digital music store ahead of its official release on 2nd March.

It’s not great for U2, although they’re by no means the only band to suffer from a high-profile pre-release leak in this way. Would all those 445,000 people have bought the album if they didn’t have BitTorrent clients? Nobody knows for sure.

“They’re probably losing out, but to find out how much, you’d have to get into the head of every music fan and assess whether they would have bought the album if they hadn’t gotten it for free,” says BigChampagne’s Eric Garland. “It’s a philosophical debate – there’s no resolution.”

This chart was originally published as part of a longer feature in the Music Ally Report, a fortnightly publication analysing digital music trends and strategies. For a free trial subscription, click here.