Big Champagne
Big Champagne is a marketing research firm focused on file-sharing networks, with "TopSwaps" charts of most-popular musical tracks and artists. The firm tells the media industry what songs are the most popular on file sharing networks, which allows the companies to market themselves better using P2P as a basis.
Big Champagne in the News
File-sharing sites make musicians more popular (15 May 2009)- The study was performed by PRS chief economist Will Page and head of media tracking firm Big Champagne Eric Garland. The point of the report was to see if patterns of music usage among file-sharers can affect the "music is marketed and sold."
EA defends SecuROM DRM (15 September 2008)- The DRM is a waste of money however, as Spore was leaked to torrent and P2P networks four days before the retail date and has been downloaded over 200,000 times according to Big Champagne, a peer-to-peer research firm.
More downloaded Radiohead via P2P then free legal alternative (5 August 2008)- According to a report from the P2P monitor Big Champagne and the UK’s MCPS-PRS royalty collector, Radiohead's latest album was downloaded by 2.3 million people via BitTorrent and P2P, for the two month period that it was available, legally and for free from Radiohead's website.
Illegal music downloading still on rise (7 February 2007)- To give you an idea of the size of illegal file sharing, Big Champagne estimates that over 1 billion tracks are exchanged monthly. Compare that against Apple's iTunes service, which has sold just over 2 billion songs since it launched back in 2003, which also represents over 70% of the legal music download business.
