Despite Pricing Offer, 500K Get Radiohead Album via P2P

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on October 17, 2007 - 12:35pm.

New York - Despite the fact that Radiohead is letting fans pay whatever they choose -- including nothing -- to download its new album from its website, more than 500,000 have downloaded the album for free off of the BitTorrent file-sharing network since its release, Forbes.com reported, citing data from peer-to-peer monitoring firm Big Champagne.

On the first day "In Rainbows" was made available for download alone, some 240,000 illegal downloads were tracked on BitTorrent, compared with the 1.2 million sales of the album on the band's site, as reported by Gigwise.com.

"People don't know Radiohead's site. They do know their favorite BitTorrent site and they use it every day," Big Champagne CEO Eric Garland told Forbes.com.

"It's quite simply easier for folks to get the illegal version than the legal version."

Related Links:
http://tinyurl.com/2w2hdf (Forbes.com)

http://www.bigchampagne.com

http://www.gigwise.com

http://www.inrainbows.com

Published in DMW Daily, October 17, 2007

Previous story: RIAA Sues Usenet.com for Facilitating Copyright Infringement
Next story: iTunes Plus Cuts Price to 99 Cents, Adds Indie Label Catalogs

Email this page

Comments

Questioning data sources

Submitted by John Freeman (not verified) on October 17, 2007 - 11:09pm.

Let's be cautious about these figures from "Big Champagne".

A while back, Online Tonight's editorial column by David Lawrence (http://onlinetonight.net/archives/001415.html) revealed Big Champagne monitors what is offered, not what is downloaded. There is a big difference.

Apparently, that information can be found by using KaZaa desktop, and a few other things on the Internet. Because there are more downloaders than uploaders, offerings are not a good statistic of what people download, and the article mentions that is an impossible statistic to get perfectly. It's something more akin to Nielsen ratings, which are estimates. According to BipBlog (http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000890.html) Big Champagne won't discuss their methods. They also don't apparently count the downloads on legitimate sites. And in using IP addresses to determine geographic location, they profess to have more accuracy than is possible.

It seems Big Champagne may have fooled the media and their clients into thinking they know much more than they do.

I'm not saying the issue of illegal downloads isn't a problem for copyright holders but surely reliable data sources are vital given that concerns have given rise to much legislation.