After years of attacking, rather than embracing the wishes of their fans, the music industry is now finally understanding what the file-sharing sites mean, and how they can tap them for marketing opportunities.
The biggest realization that the industry is finally beginning to understand is that the biggest downloaders, in many cases, are the biggest music fans. They are starting to think of ways to reach them; rather than sue or enrage them.
One of the events that changed everything was the Supreme Court ruling concerning Grokster. The reason this is important is because the companies wanted to use the sites to market to, but were afraid if they did, it would undermine their legal efforts.
According to Randy Saaf, chief executive of MediaDefender: "we're basically free to exploit these billions of fake files we're putting out."
What is happening is that companies are putting decoy files onto the file sharing sites that have marketing material embedded into them.
Jay-Z recently got together with Coke to do this very thing and it has succeeded tremendously. A Jay-Z concert clip has been downloaded over 2.5 million times with Coke marketing within the clip.
One thing that is pretty funny about the whole little game being played is that now the file-sharing sites are on the defensive and are releasing new changes that make it harder for these clips to be planted. In a funny turn-of-events, now the one's that are being pirated are considered spammers.
I think the good thing here for the music industry is that if they continually do this, it will become more accepted and embraced by the music fans themselves. And this would be done partly through the sites that the industry has been trying to destroy.
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