The Napster parasites

Napster did not respond to press inquiries for this story. But at some point in the past six months, the company slipped a nifty new feature into its software: the ability to send an instant message to someone else who is logged on to the file-trading network. So if you've been a regular Napster user recently, you may have received the odd instant message from a fellow user who wanted to share some music or had a question about one of your tunes. Lately, however, the barrage of instant messages has both increased in frequency and turned sharply toward the promotional.

On a recent evening, for example, I was logged on to Napster for just a few hours; in that time I received three different instant messages from strangers. One, from a user who went as "Free_Mp3," sent me a note that said, "Tip: the Trance trax on your drive are old. Download FREE new Trance MP3's. They're floor killers!!!" The link sent me to a page on MP3.com where I could download tunes from a band called Analog Pussies. Another message came in just minutes later, from a user called "ovk01." "Hi janelle, i found 'depeche' on your hard disk, maybe you like synthpop too. Have you heard 'against me' by 'lederer'? Get it at http://www.ustop.de!" This one, too, led to a band's home page where I could download some free tunes.

I didn't take them up on their offers -- I don't actually care much for either trance or Depeche Mode, though I did happen to have both on my hard drive. But I appreciated the persistent self-marketing of these unknown bands, who were clearly trying to pinpoint potential fans by associating their tastes with their own bands' influences. The approach seems to be working for Analog Pussies: The band has collected over $8,451 in Payback for Playback money, which means that tens of thousands of potential fans have already checked out their music.

But it isn't merely resourceful unsigned bands that have picked up on the joys of Napster-mediated instant messaging. Scott Ross, director of new media for electronic music label Moonshine, started picking up on the possibilities for instant message promotions last fall. He and his team now scour Napster on a daily basis, searching for fans who have Moonshine's artists on their hard drives. After finding one, they'll strike up a conversation and then suggest downloading other free promotional MP3s or signing up for fan mailing lists.

"That's as targeted a marketing technique as you can possibly get," says Ross. "This person is obviously a fan -- they've dedicated hard drive space to the artist -- so it's logical that they would be interested in this." And it's very effective, he says: "Everyone I've instant-messaged downloaded the song."

But this kind of personalized promotion is also extremely time-consuming. Napster's instant-messaging feature only allows you to contact two users at once, making it difficult to reach a large number of fans in a concentrated period of time.

Which is where companies like BigChampagne and A.D.D. Marketing come in.

Online market research company BigChampagne is the mastermind behind the Aimee Mann promotion. This company has developed its own software tools that allow it to conduct massive instant-messaging sweeps for its clients, not just on Napster but also on peer-to-peer networks like Gnutella and Scour. According to Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, Mann is one of the first official tests of the system, but the company has clients at "all the major record labels." BigChampagne's beta test of its system was for Glen Phillips, the singer of the now-defunct band Toad the Wet Sprocket. Phillips searched Napster for users with Toad the Wet Sprocket tunes on their hard drives and then instant-messaged them with the URL for his new band; more than 20,000 fans have since registered at his Web site.

But Garland calls this kind of instant-messaging promotion just "a stunt." The real marketing opportunity in P2P networks, he says, is gathering data about user habits. "We seized onto P2P because it allows a singular opportunity to observe really intimate consumer behavior," he explains. "You're not asking them what's your taste in music, games, books, what have you -- you're looking in the pantry, straight into the fridge."

BigChampagne scours all the P2P networks, watching what is downloaded on a daily basis and making charts tracking the popularity of various songs, pirated software and films, video games and other illicit files. Garland then reports back to his clients: "by and large, artists, management and content owners who want to see exactly what's getting what reaction where."

For example, if an album makes its way onto Napster before it's released in stores, BigChampagne will track how many users are sharing the record, the popularity of each track on the album -- including whether users don't like a track and later delete it from their hard drives -- and general "buzz." It can track user tastes, correlating fans of Madonna with fans of Britney Spears, for example, and then (in more general file-swapping networks like Gnutella) seeing whether those fans also have pirated copies of Quake and the movie "X-Men." "In terms of positioning an artist, there are big opportunities," Garland says. "This is an industry that's anxious to sell a widget to you, and the first way to do that is to know who you are and what you're like."

Next Page: Napster needs to make amends with musicians

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