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File-sharing making popular acts more popular

By | Published on Friday 15 May 2009

A new study by PRS For Music and media tracking firm Big Champagne has found that rather than opening up a world of choice to music fans, file-sharing websites tend mostly to make already popular acts more so, with the tracks most often downloaded illegally mirroring those at the top of the charts.

While this should come as no real surprise, the research also claims that despite the range of choice on offer, illegal downloading does not help smaller artists to find a wider audience in the same way.

Will Page, chief economist at PRS, and Eric Garland, head of Big Champagne, who carried out the research, say that the volume on offer for free on the internet means most people have neither the desire or the inclination to start searching through it to find something new. Instead, they will rely mostly on recommendations from friends and what they see in the media. As a result, they claimed, there has never been a big hit on illegal sites that has not also done well legally.

The report states: “Much of the volume (sales or swaps) is concentrated amongst a small proportion of the available tracks. After taking into account some geographic differences, the top of the many music charts, from licensed and unlicensed venues, are markedly similar”.

This, it claims, shows that there is no evidence that the ‘long tail’ theory is currently operating. That theory says that in the internet age, because you can offer entire catalogues of content all the time, you might sell less of each product, but as a catalogue owner you’ll sell more overall – ie more people will buy old stuff, even if fewer people are buying new stuff. But, as we’ve said before, this only works if these catalogues are properly promoted in a timely way, something for the most part the music industry is yet to do.

Despite this, the report did find that people are more likely to occasionally try out something they don’t know already on illegal sites than via paid for services. It says: “If the sellers sell it, it might never be bought; but if the swappers offer it, at least one person will likely take it”. For this reason, it continues, content owners may serve themselves better by view file-sharing sites services comparable to broadcast networks like radio and TV, rather than competitors to legal download stores.



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