BigChampagne Media Measurement Blog

U2’s concert at the Rose Bowl shattered attendance records at the venue as more than 100,000 people, including Rose Bowl staff, took in the band’s Southern California stop on its 360 Tour, according to the venue’s general manager, Darryl Dunn. Yet the number of fans who watched the concert online probably dwarfs that tally.

Final figures aren’t in yet from Google-owned YouTube, which streamed the concert live, but the page housing the concert has received close to 7 million “channel views.”

A YouTube spokesman expects to have viewership numbers today, but does note that the concert was the top global-trending topic on Twitter while it was streaming. The promotional clip advertising the concert received 2.7 million views.

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Best Buy senior music purchaser Chris Smith isn’t expecting a noticeable bump in sales for U2’s new “No Line on the Horizon” CD from the stream, as the retailer hasn’t necessarily witnessed a correlation between YouTube content and retail sales.

But Nielsen SoundScan tracks data through Sunday evening, and the final data may not be reflected on this week’s chart.

The album did, however, receive a one-day boost on iTunes, albeit a relatively minor one, according to data from Big Champagne. The album jumped from No. 68 to No. 59.

During a visit to Hollywood last week, I wanted to talk to people who knew a thing or two about the film industry’s burgeoning meltdown. One of the people I sought out was Eric Garland, CEO and co-founder of Big Champagne.

Beverly Hills, Calif.,-based Big Champagne has collected data on file-sharing and sold it to media companies for almost 10 years. Garland’s company has survived all that time, even while making the same sad pitch. He tells the music labels and film studios they are going to be chopped down at the knees by the Internet and online piracy—but that doesn’t mean they can’t survive.

As anyone might have guessed, almost everybody in media initially told Big Champagne to stick a cork in it. Back in the early part of the decade, nobody wanted to hear it, and Garland logged lots of five-minute meetings. Thanks to his persistence, though, he saw up close how digital technology buffeted the music industry. Now, some of the big labels are striking partnerships with his company.

What makes Garland an important speaker on this subject is that despite his gloomy message, he’s bullish on both the Internet and movies. His interests and Hollywood’s are aligned, he says, because if the studios don’t survive then he loses customers. He wants them to do well but he just doesn’t think that telling them what they want to hear, the “bedtime stories” as he calls it, is going to help.

Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Nixon, who was hoping to get just 10,000 or so downloads out of the scheme, says he is very happy with the outcome so far. Typically, about 35,000 of his songs a week trade on illegal file-sharing networks, levels that largely haven’t changed since the promotion started Oct. 6, indicating a separate group of fans may be tapping into the songs.

“That would be much bigger than his traditional audience,” says Eric Garland, chief executive officer of filesharing consultancy Big Champagne LLC. “The people-who-bought-this-also-bought aspect of Amazon is going to make this really viral within the Amazon marketplace.”

Wall Street Journal:

The number of top country songs swapped on file-sharing networks spiked 52% in the past year, while activity in most genres was largely flat, according to the monitoring firm BigChampagne.

LA TIMES:

Cyrus was leaving Twitter while she was on top. According to data from BigChampagne, Cyrus had the third-most Twitter followers among musicians as of Oct. 6, with more than 2.2 million users tracking her pimple updates. Only Britney Spears and John Mayer had more.

Digital Music News:

The music industry has more transactions, and less money.  Consumers are more engaged than ever, though less businesses have the ability to monetize it.  But is the music industry ready to assume a smaller footprint, shrink cost structures, and realign pricing towards radically-refreshed consumer valuations on media?

At Digital Music Forum West on Wednesday in Los Angeles, BigChampagne’s Eric Garland advised a packed ballroom that smaller is smarter, and TopSpin vice president of Marketing & Artist Services James Lamberti noted that A&R (artists and repertoire, or talent-scouting and development) is no longer a scalable craft.

This is the stuff of disruptive transition, though many executives seemed resistant to the structural shift.  Major labels are typically defensive in public forums, and the spin is sometimes extreme.  But the ‘think small’ advice simply added fuel to the fire.  “You’ve always been able to do it without a label,” said Interscope Geffen A&M head of Digital Ted Mico, responding to the increasing wave of do-it-yourself artists.  “But can you be a world superstar without a major label investment?  Probably, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

On the issue of A&R scalability, Mico also offered a different take - one that reflected big thinking, not dime-based transition.  “The idea that A&R doesn’t scale actually isn’t true,” Mico asserted, while referring to broader, 360-degree development and ownership structures.  “If you’re part of building a brand, you have no idea what the true value of that brand may be worth over time,” Mico continued, while referencing an expansion by Dr. Dre into consumer electronics like headphones and computers (Beats by Dr. Dre).

Others jumped in with similar, broader-term takes.  Rhapsody America vice president of Programming & Creative Tim Quirk noted that “there’s too much ‘how much money can I make today?’” while moderator Ted Cohen (TAG Strategic) opined that “we’re looking at artists in terms of their long-term potential, instead of ‘we’ll get them to here, and then revisit this.’”

Separately, Getty Images vice president of Entertainment Partnerships and Development Vince Bannon directly countered the ‘get-smaller’ takeaway, telling Garland that Getty is actually growing, not shrinking.  “It’s funny, because I want to say ‘Eric, I am at Getty Images, and I’m at a growing company,’” Bannon retorted, while pointing to a profitable images business that also includes music components.  “We acquired Pump Audio a couple years ago… we have musicians on there that are now making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing blanket licensing,” Bannon continued.

Suddenly, the topic of ‘smaller’ has indelibly entered the discussion, and other executives sided with a projection of diminished, more hardscrabble revenues ahead.  “It’s going to take a lot of work to build the revenue base, but it will never reach anything close to what it once was,” commented David Leibowitz, the newly-slotted chairman of Sir Groovy and a former RIAA attorney.  “You’re never going to get anywhere near the level it was before.”

Report by publisher Paul Resnikoff in Los Angeles.

Digital Music News:

As part of its research-focused kickoff on Wednesday, the Digital Music Forum in Los Angeles featured an update from BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland.  “If I only had time for one slide, this would be the slide,” Garland opened, pointing to a simple picture of a CD with a $16.99 price tag next to it.  The picture spoke a thousand words, and offered Garland a nice runway to discuss the ‘dollars to dimes’ transition (to quote NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker) currently embroiling the business.

So what’s the state of the disruptive union?  Garland noted that BitTorrent is the only place where albums are growing, a stark contrast to the physical collapse.  After just 30 days, BigChampagne data showed a total of 1.3 million BitTorrent downloads of U2’s No Line on the Horizon.  Even more surprising, the acceleration really took off once album was officially released.

What else?  Paid song downloads are plateauing, though on-demand streams continue to grow.  “The top songs sell a few hundred thousand weekly, less than 10 percent of free, legal streams,” Garland shared, while also pointing to the gargantuan role that YouTube plays in the on-demand space.

But the only problem is that most of that action is not being monetized - at least on any meaningful level.  “Increasingly, even in this world where we’ve gained some control, we still don’t have the per unit value to drive these businesses,” Garland continued.

But what about those huge price tags on YouTube ($1.65 billion), Bebo ($850 million), Last.fm ($280 million), and MySpace ($580 million)?  Those bonanzas made a lot of people rich, except for the media companies powering the content.  “None of this money traditionally makes it back to the content owners,” Garland relayed.

Suddenly, this is a business that needs to get smaller, just to get back into the game.  Actually, a well-timed opinion by ex-eMusic CEO and current venture capitalist David Pakman worked its way into the presentation, perhaps another pour of coffee for a business still bent on high-priced digital assets and higher cost structures.  “We’re going to have to get small,” Garland stated, while using Perez Hilton as the joking example (Perez lives in the modest Park La Brea apartment complex in Los Angeles).  “Last year, a lot of us drove here in SUVs; next year, a lot of us will be driving here in sub-compacts,” Garland analogized.

That sounds more like the ‘smaller market with inferior economics’ that Pakman described, ironically a reference to the book publishing industry - perhaps next on the disruptive line.

Report by publisher Paul Resnikoff in Los Angeles.

In our most enlightening Q&A to date, BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland shares his insight on the issues facing the music and technology business in the last 10 years. It’s a must read for industry insiders in the online and offline world. He recently stopped by RM 64 headquarters to sit down with office janitors Berko Pearce and Scott Sheldon where they also discussed the finer points of Joe Fleischer’s hair.