What's Hot in Music? Ask Big Champagne

Whenever the subject is music downloads, you hear the name "Big Champagne." These are the folks who keep track of every music fileshare, and now they're providing radio stations with lists of which songs are illegally downloaded the most, to help the stations play the songs people want to hear.

The WSJ had a story last night about this that also pointed out the difference between radio listeners and filesharers: The sharers warm to new songs faster, and the former tend to simply listen, and either like it or hate it.

Big Champagne does include iTunes downloads in their mix..."though they represent a tiny fraction of all downloads," the story said. So far there are more than 100 radio stations who've signed up to get the song intelligence, and it's working.

The other way stations glean popularity information about songs is the call out. They phone people in their listening areas and play 20-30 'hooks' or snippets of tunes, and ask them to rate them. But it's getting harder: "People don't have time, they have their phone blocked," and while they keep at it, the download data will soon eclipse these phone surveys as the number one way to determine what makes a station's playlist.