Report: Top Songs at Retail Also Most Popular on P2P

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on May 14, 2009 - 12:32pm.

London - In a study that purports to disprove Wired editor Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" theory of retail, U.K. industry body PRS for Music and file-sharing tracker BigChampagne found that the most-popular songs at retail were also the most popular tracks being downloaded from file-sharing networks.

The analysis of billions of file exchanges globally over a 12-month period found that 5% of available songs accounted for 80% of traffic on peer-to-peer services, and these most popular songs were traded over 14 million times.

"We are yet to see a big hit or wildly popular release in the pirate market that was not also a top seller in the licensed market," said BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland.

The study also found that 13 million songs were traded at least once over the past year.

http://snipurl.com/i1gke (Billboard)

http://snipurl.com/i1d0p (PaidContent)

http://www.prsformusic.com

http://www.bigchampagne.com