Maverick and the BigChampagne
It was one of those sunglasses-required days in Los Angeles when Eric Garland, a leading expert on music downloading, arrived for his meeting with a senior media company executive. Rather than talking in the company’s air-conditioned offices, the executive led Garland and his partner through a fetid back alley to a secluded courtyard.
Only then did the executive ask his question: Which songs, exactly, are the millions of Internet users illegally downloading? “I just thought, this is crazy,” recalled Garland, who had to prop his laptop on a dumpster to give his presentation.
The reason for the cloak-and-dagger theatrics: While the music industry publicly flays Kazaa and other file-swapping services for aiding piracy, those same services provide an excellent view of what’s really popular with fans.
Record-label executives discreetly use Garland’s research firm, BigChampagne, and other services to track which songs are traded online and help pick which new singles to release. They increasingly use such file-sharing data to convince radio stations and MTV to give new songs a spin or boost airplay for those that are popular with downloaders.
Some labels even monitor what people do with their music after they download it to better structure deals with licensed downloading services. The ultimate goal is what it always has been in the record business: Sell more music.
“I know of a case where an artist had obviously gone with the wrong single, and everyone loved this other song they had on their record,” said Guy Oseary, Madonna‘s business partner and head of her label, Maverick Records. “In the world of what we do, it’s always good to have real information from real fans.”
Maverick used BigChampagne‘s 100-city breakdown of popularly downloaded songs to convince radio stations to start playing a new band, Story of the Year, during prime daytime listening hours instead of at night.
The online data revealed that despite Story of the Year’s lunar rotation, its single Until the Day I Die ranked among the top 20 most popular downloads, alongside tracks from Blink-182, Audioslave and Hoobastank that received significantly more airplay. And when the band performed in a city, “we didn’t necessarily see the phones blowing up at radio, but we saw download requests for the song skyrocket as they went through,” said Jeremy Welt, Maverick‘s head of new media.
Armed with this data, Maverick fought for more airtime at radio, which translated into more CD sales. Story of the Year’s album, Page Avenue, just went gold, selling more than half a million copies.
“I definitely don’t like to spin it that piracy is OK because we get to look at the data. It’s too bad that people are stealing so much music,” said Welt. “That said, we would be very foolish if we didn’t look and pay attention to what’s going on.”
It’s not an isolated example. Garland said Warner Bros. followed a similar promotional strategy with Headstrong, the new single from the Los Gatos rock band Trapt. Indeed, nearly all the labels work with BigChampagne on a project or subscription basis, he said.
Some promoters at the major labels have gone a step further, using advertising agencies or other intermediaries to place ads on popular file-swapping networks to promote new acts.
Before the music industry effectively shut down AudioGalaxy in 2002, the labels would pay the file-swapping service to sponsor search terms to direct fans looking to download songs from, say, Radiohead, to an emerging band with a similar style.
“We’d promote it to you right there,” said AudioGalaxy founder Michael Merhej, whose account was confirmed by two independent sources. “The link took you to a third-party Web site done by the label, but you couldn’t tell it was done by the label. This went on for a long time.”
“My feeling is there’s a promotional value to exposure,” said Artemis Records chairman Danny Goldberg, an influential industry player who previously headed Mercury Records, now part of giant Universal Music. “Give something away for free, and hope they fall in love.”
Article by: Dawn C. Chmielewski
Source: Houston Chronicle