Eminem's new CD is the first unreleased album to hit the list of top CD's
accessing the CDDB database.  It is kind of scary to learn below all the
information they can assemble.

Kelly




Eminem CD spotlights new piracy patterns

By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

May 28, 2002, 11:55 AM PT

Well before rapper Eminem's new record hit store shelves Sunday, it had
already become the second-most-played CD in computer drives around the
world, according to one closely watched measure.

That figure comes care of Gracenote, a company whose window into computer
users' listening habits offers a sobering look at the changing patterns
of Internet piracy and traditional music bootlegging.

Gracenote maintains a huge online database that can identify CDs by
calling up the exact list and length of songs. Most of the popular music
software programs for computers, such as Winamp or RealNetworks' RealOne,
check this database when a new CD is put into a computer, allowing the
software to tell a listener the name of the CD and its song titles.

Generally, this high-tech "Top 40" holds few surprises. But last week,
Eminem's "The Eminem Show," which was yet to be released, cracked the
chart at No. 2. Although pirated versions of the album were widely
acknowledged to be online in MP3 format, Gracenote's figures look only at
physical CDs, not downloads played on a computer.

"It's pretty safe to say that it's all CD-Rs that people have bought off
the streets or burned from friends," said Gracenote CEO David Hyman.
"This is the first time anything unreleased has shown up at No. 2."

Eminem's label, Vivendi Universal-owned Interscope, twice moved up the
album's release date, citing widespread Internet piracy. Some retailers
reportedly began selling it Friday in advance of Sunday's last-minute
official release date. But the direct link between pre-release online
song-swapping and bootlegged CDs has rarely been drawn as clearly as with
this album.

Get it early, just $5 The Friday before the Eminem album's long-awaited
release, a busy street corner in New York was dotted with bootleggers'
card tables and blankets, each strewn with pirated copies of CDs and
movies for sale.

"The Eminem Show," priced at just $5 a copy, sat next to videotapes of
"Star Wars: Attack of the Clones," released into theaters two weeks ago.

Bootleggers, who declined to be identified by name, said the Eminem CDs
came from the Internet, although they didn't give details about how they
downloaded, burned or bought the copies.

The Internet "is the only place where we can touch it," said one street
vendor, who didn't want to be identified.

Gracenote's data shows a few patterns that may lie behind these
bootleggers' business, however.

The company's database examines CDs' tables of contents down to slices
just one-seventy-fifth of a second long. Copies that look identical at
that scale almost always come from the same master copy, the company
says.

In the case of the Eminem CD, eight slightly different versions accounted
for most of the traffic. That means there's likely "eight major guys
doing most of the pressing of this," Hyman said.

The company did a little detective work to figure out where most of the
traffic originated. About 86 percent of the CD listening came from inside
the United States. Los Angeles was the top listening location, and New
York was second, Hyman said. The company hasn't crunched the numbers
enough to figure out whether each location had its own dominant version
of the bootleg, he said.

Gracenote doesn't give exact figures on traffic, but it said the No. 2
slot in its charts represented a total figure of listeners in the
"mid-tens of thousands" over the course of the week. Because most major
music software stores song information on the computer after checking
Gracenote's database once, many or most of those tens of thousands
represent individual listeners, rather than multiple listens by the same
person.

Will listeners buy the real thing? Eminem's previous album, "The Marshall
Mathers LP," set sales records in 2000, with more than 1.7 million copies
sold in the first week after release. The industry will be watching the
new release closely, both as a sign of the health of the struggling music
business and as an indicator of the effects of early Internet piracy on
major releases.

Analysts caution, however, that the real result of the early piracy will
be impossible to untangle, whether sales figures are high or low. The
online versions and bootlegging could serve as a marketing vehicle,
whetting fans' appetite for the real thing, noted P.J. McNealy, research
director for GartnerG2, a division of the Gartner research firm. Or it
may cut into sales.

"We've yet to see hard numbers on what the marketing effects of piracy
are," McNealy noted. "This could be like "Attack of the Clones." People
may have pirated that, but they still went out and saw it in the
theater."

Sales figures for the first two days of the Eminem release weren't yet
available.

Gracenote would not comment on whether it has been contacted by
Interscope as a result of its information. An Interscope representative
could not immediately be reached for comment.

Hyman said the company didn't keep enough information in its database to
be useful to anti-piracy investigators. The technology does log Internet
addresses and count CD titles, as well as keep a username for people
checking the database, but it does not correlate this data, he said.

"We don't keep the data" that antipiracy investigators might want, Hyman
said. "The last thing we'd ever want to do is become some kind of
policing entity."

News.com's Jim Hu contributed to this report from New York.


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