In Rainbows downloads confirm: P2P attracts more, far more
Yet another case of stating the obvious by the majors: the statistical analyses on downloads of In Rainbows, the last album of the English band Radiohead which so much has been and continue to be talked about demonstrate the very strong trend among the users to download contents from file sharing, independently by the availability of legal alternatives even at zero price.
In Rainbows was released on the 10th of October 2007 as a digital download on the band website, which has proposed to the public a new “do-it-yourself-price” model never tried before by musicians of the same level as Radiohead. Although the numbers of the official downloads - that is the ones ascribable to the In Rainbows servers - were never published, the “Online Media Measurement” company BigChampagne and the group of representatives for majors and artists MCPS-PRS Alliance have obtained their own statistics comparing them with the contemporary activity on the “unofficial” servers, that is the endless galaxy of websites devoted to download on the BitTorrent network.
The result of joined study is obvious: the unauthorized In Rainbows .torrents downloaded were 400,000 in a single day and 2.3 millions in the first 25 days from the on-line availability of the album. In comparison, the most legally downloaded record of the same period barely totaled 158,000 downloads. At this point whatever is the amount of the official numbers owned by Radiohead, concludes the study, is obvious the overwhelming prevalence of the use of sharing channels that the besotted majors still insist to define “illegal”.
“Rights-holders should be aware that these non-traditional venues are stubbornly entrenched, incredibly popular and will never go away” stated the chief executive of BigChampagne and co-author of the study Eric Garland, shattering the myth so beloved by the multimedia industry according to which less piracy means more incomes and popularity. “That is not the case“, curtails Garland.
The majors cannot thwart in any way the force behind the digital contents sharing on the Internet, suggests the analyst, and this is true both for super-fast BitTorrent network and all the other major sharing networks available. The only alternative left to the majors is that of giving up once and forever to the will of control on the spread and the free enjoyment of contents, which ultimately is the only true interest of the labels for the delivery locked by the DRM technologies and the fight without quarter - even though fruitless in the practical results - to P2P.
As clearly demonstrated by the outcome of the Radiohead initiative - an outcome measured on the popularity of In Rainbows and the ticket sales for their last concerts - the loss of control in the information society is compensated by an exponential growth of the income opportunities. In this sense the problem appears to be a cultural one, considering that the majors don’t seem disposed to admit to have mistaken everything with Internet, from Napster onward, at the cost of risking the ultimate extinction of the Big Four Sisters of record.
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- Waiting to enlist providers, RIAA continues to attend in courts
- EFF Report: RIAA legal crusade losing credibility
- The Pirate Bay, the decree of Bergamo judge is on-line
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- Italy, The Pirate Bay withstands the majors’ assault
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