Music Business Journal

by Luiz Augusto Buff

More than ten years have passed since the debut of Napster shook the record industry. The file-sharing software gave music listeners access to an immense diversity of music for free, causing a shift in industry power from record labels to consumers. The popularity of MP3 files increased even more with the success of the iPod. Even before Napster, recorded music sales were dropping year after year, due to discounts that labels were given to wholesale prices globally. Those numbers dropped even further when the demand shifted to the free content available on the Net. After the panic, artists and the music industry started to understand the opportunities that the Internet was offering, and started to migrate to new models of marketing and distribution through the online world. Still, adaptations are a necessity in the legal system to guarantee the functioning of the creative process. The fight against piracy continues but hopefully a new business model that takes advantage of the “feels like free” system will drive people to a legal form of consumption that not only will attend the demand for lower prices, but will help elevate the value of music back to a sustainable level.

Apple

In 2003, with the intention to provide legal content for their successful iPod, Apple developed the iTunes Store. The iPod had become the worldwide standard media player but the lack of legal content was the main issue that the company had to face. After forming agreements with all the major record labels, the digital retailer store was a booming success and is now responsible for more than 70% of the digital sales and the biggest retailer store in the overall music market, accounting for 25% of the market share, accordingly to IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry).

Before the online-based sales of music products, in order to get access to one specific song the listener had to buy an entire album. That meant that to buy one song, one had to pay for the ten (or more) other songs that came with it. One of the major changes that happened with the iTunes Store was the commercialization of single tracks- making it cheaper for listeners to buy their favorite songs. The number of units sold increased significantly but the sales performance of the recorded music products dropped radically.

CONTINUE READING on the State of the Music Industry

By Amy Mantis

With the advent of online marketing, social media platforms, music streaming services, and music piracy, it has become increasingly difficult to track the consumption of music. Falling record sales in conjunction with the explosion of new media delivery has made the task of monitoring an artist’s progress far more complicated than it used to be. For the past decade, BigChampagne has quietly operated behind the scenes, tracking how consumers find, acquire, and listen to music on the Internet. Throughout, the company has taken some big steps towards redefining the way the music industry measures success.

The Back Story

Founded in 2000 by Zachary Allison, Eric Garland, and Adam Toll, BigChampagne’s first venture was tracking what songs people were downloading at Napster and the various other file-sharing programs that followed.[1]

Garland and Allison hired coders to build software capable of tracking and archiving the contents of shared folders and up to fifty million daily search queries with the intent of selling the service to major record labels.[2] Amidst the copyright infringement lawsuits that labels filed in conjunction with the RIAA, the companies resisted the idea at first—figuring the courts were about to solve the problem. But as other P2P networks began surfacing, it became evident that file sharing was there to stay. NPD Group research estimates that 31 million Americans shared music from a P2P service in September 2002.[3]

BigChampagne got its first big break when the popular punk rock band the Offspring came forward in support of file sharing networks. According to Garland, “[Offspring] knew this was more an opportunity than a threat.”[4] He and his team immediately began tracking and reporting the band’s progress on P2P websites. Through the band’s management, Garland contacted Offspring’s attorney, Peter Peterno, whose roster included a number of other well established acts like, Destiny’s Child and Will Smith. Seeing the potential in Garland’s new service, Peterno promptly signed his other acts to be tracked as well, thus opening the floodgates for BigChampagne.[5]

Continue Reading on BigChampagne’s Ultimate Chart.