MINING YOUR BEHAVIOUR

We've heard before that record labels are busily sifting data from filesharing networks as a form of marketing research - conferring legitimacy on a practice they supposedly decry - but the Pitchfork report on how they use that data is still pretty eye-opening:

To take an example, here's what I can tell you about the Arcade Fire, thanks to a BigChampagne report. The week of August 4, 1.3% of filesharers-- maybe 200,000-300,000 people-- were sharing the band's music, up from just .20% last December. From their debut LP Funeral, "Rebellion (Lies)" scored the most listeners-- and the most searches-- and "In the Backseat" got the least. San Francisco is their biggest market this week, with 2.17% audience penetration (far more than, say, a mere .30% in Colorado Springs). And 60.52% of Arcade Fire fans also have Coldplay in their collections, while only 4.22% of Coldplay listeners have Arcade Fire-- but you can also see that 34.63% of the Arcade Fire fans have tracks by fellow indie Canadians Hot Hot Heat, and 9.65% of Hot Hot Heat's fans like to get their Funeral on.

We're still not entirely sure how the RIAA can square their members using this sort of data at the same time as insisting filesharers are evil. Indeed, with this sort of data available, you might argue that far from killing music, p2p is subsidising the music industry's marketing costs.

[Thanks for the link to Mitya]

music filesharing hot hot heat