How the Internet Is Shaking Up the Music Business

Chris Dahlen at Pitchfork has written an interesting article titled The Chumbawamba Factor:

Everybody knows by now that the internet has shaken up the music business. But one of the subtler changes has been the amount of raw information that the industry collects-- to study the music that sells, and to face up to the music that doesn't.

It's stunning to think about how much music fans are telling us about themselves, in their search queries, the libraries on their hard drives, and the lists they print on their MySpace pages. It's the same kind of quantum leap that we forget to appreciate in, say, web surfing or TiVO, where someone's collecting exponentially more information about you than they ever could before.

The article focuses on BigChampagne, a market research firm specializing in P2P networks.

Read on for more (and to find out what the "Chumbawamba Factor" is).