Times have changed for most radio stations, including San Francisco's
Live 105. Fewer listeners, stiffer competition from other media, and the downloading craze have pretty much thrown everyone in radio for a loop.
It's the job of program director Sean Demery to figure out what people want to hear. One new way is by monitoring what file swappers are searching for and sharing most. He does it with the help of a market-data software company called
Big Champagne. Tonight on "Tech Live," we'll show you why everyone's paying attention to the information Big Champagne is digging up online.
"It basically gives me pretty much what's happening in the mass culture," Demery said. "It tells me what's popular."
Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, compares what his company does online to what the Nielsen rating system does for television.
The company analyzes billions of search requests and song downloads with proprietary software that lives on public P2P networks such as
KaZaA and
Morpheus. Clients then get categorized lists of online music trends, right down to the city in which downloaders live.
"What our technology does is take advantage of the fact that in particular, the exchange of media is dependent on information published by each person connected to the Net," Garland said.
That data is proving to be priceless. In the weeks before rapper 50 Cent's new album "Get Rich Or Die Tryin'" hit stores, Big Champagne saw his songs were queried and swapped like crazy, prompting
Interscope Records to release the album five days sooner.
The album is now a huge hit. Translation? Your searches and your song swaps count. Literally. "We have a demand curve that precedes the introduction of new content," Garland said.
For Live 105's Demery, the information helps, to a degree. But it also reveals a surprising quirk of the music industry. "When you really boil it down to what's hot on the downloads," Demery said, "it's the same stuff people are buying, the same stuff people are requesting, the same stuff the radio stations are playing."
