Big Champagne: The Meaning of Success
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.
