IndyStar.com

BigChampagne’s clients say ignoring file sharing wouldn’t make sense. “It’s a fact of life at this time,” says Rich Meyer, Mediabase’s president and executive vice president at Premiere.
Joe Fleischer, BigChampagne’s vice president for sales and marketing, says the legality of grabbing music is a separate issue from the insight into people’s taste the downloads offer. He notes the company incorporates legal, paid downloads from sites like iTunes into its data, though they represent a fraction of all downloads.
Currently, says Emmis radio head Rick Cummings, the download information is not as helpful as the phone calls known in the business as “call-out” research, in which people listen to clips of songs and rate them. But at some point, the download data are “going to be the primary method of research.”
It’s getting harder to do passive call-out research, Cummings says, because “people don’t have time, they have their phone blocked.” But Emmis perseveres with the calls, in part because it reaches a slightly different listener that way — people who don’t necessarily buy or download music regularly but who like to listen to the radio.
Filesharers tend to be bigger music fans than radio listeners and generally warm to new songs faster. But basing a playlist exclusively on downloaders’ tastes could end up alienating more passive listeners, Cummings says.
It also isn’t easy to tell which medium influences the other more. “When a radio station adds a song, you oftentimes see an immediate bump in downloading activity” in that city, says Meyer of Mediabase.