BigChampagne och The Chumbawamba Factor

Postat: 2005-09-20 kl. 09.23

Garland recalls that around 2000 or 2001, when record sales first started to drop industrywide, "We actually got kind of cute about it and told them, 'Look, we have a theory about why your business is in decline now. We call it the Chumbawamba Factor.'" If you remember the song "Tubthumbing"-- the one that goes, "I get knocked down/ But I get up again"-- you may recall that the album, Tubthumping, and actually every other album that the one-time punk band ever recorded, sounded nothing like their big hit.

"Chumbawamba sold a lot of records, and every single one of them ended up in a milkcrate at a yard sale, six months after it was purchased. And what we told [the record labels] is, 'Look, you had a great long run of business essentially built on regrettable impulse buys,'" says Garland. "'That was a great business, make no mistake. You owed much of your success to that. But it engendered a lot of cumulative ill-will with the customer.'"

The internet changed that. All of a sudden, legally or not, consumers could test the product themselves.

[...]

The classic case for how BigChampagne supports a client-- who can range from struggling new artists to the entire roster of a major-- is by analyzing whether listeners have found a hit before radio. Let's say that in a given market, a single hasn't broken onto radio, but BigChampagne discovers that listeners in that city are swapping it in huge volume; the label can take that information to radio programmers and urge them to spin the song to death, turning it into an official hit.

Pitchfork Media The Chumbawamba Factor (2005-08-22)

Don't actions like hiring BigChampagne and using data gathered from peer-to-peer networks as a marketing tool undermine the RIAA's claims that filesharing is hurting the industry, as well as the lawsuits the RIAA keeps mercilessly bringing against peer-to-peer filesharers?

Suicide Girls RIAA Uses P2P for More Than Just Suing Users (2005-09-20)