Last.fm hold the key to stopping music piracy

Piracy and the prevention thereof is a popular topic on the Internet this week; with the eagerly anticipated "Spore" being released last Friday, forums around the world have sparked up debate about piracy once more.

The reason for this is that EA introduced one of the most invasive and (in my eyes) sinister DRM systems known to man. This thing limits the amount of activations you can have (to only 3) and phones home periodically to let them know you're being legal. I'm not going to express my feelings on this matter right now, it just got me thinking about how companies such as Last.fm can turn music piracy into a quantifiable metric, rather than the vague figures you get from games and other entertainment media.

Last.fm
I've been a member of Last.fm since before they were called that (back when they were just Audioscrobbler); they're a service that log all the MP3's you listen to. So every time you listen to a track, their plugin syncs to their server and records that you've listened to [x]. Over time you can see your listening trends, it graphs which artists you listen to most frequently and has become a very good and powerful web2.0 site.

One of the things that interests me this week is the fact that because they know specifically what you've been listening to, they know whether you've pirated the album or not (on the most part). Let me explain using an example.

Metallica
On September 12th Metallica are due to release "Death Magnetic", their first album since the rather horrible "St Anger" released mid way through 2003. This is one of the most anticipated albums of the past few years and as a metal-head myself I am excited. Metallica are also notorious throughout the Internet for the fuss they kicked up over Napster - so much so that the P2P network was closed.

Let's look at the Metallica artist page on Last.fm shall we (it's 2 days before the album is due to be released as I write this):

This graph shows the most listened tracks for the past 7 days for Metallica. For context (for those of you unfamiliar with Metallica's discography) I've marked in orange the tracks that are off the new (unreleased) album. I count 10 of those top 15 tracks being from an unreleased album. Funnily enough, the new album only has 10 tracks.

While there are review copies floating around (I receive them for review periodically), most reviewers wouldn't dare rip them for the Internet. So it's possible that some of these scrobbles are from people like myself who review albums. Furthermore, 'The Day That Never Comes' was the single from the album and released onto the radio a couple of weeks before the album was due to be released, so it makes sense for that to be in the public domain too. So what about the rest?

Yup, it looks like Metallica has been hit by, been struck by, piracy!

So what?
You forget. If you're signed up to Last.fm they've got your email address, username, details of friends, blog posts, gigs you've attended and viably (if you're a paying member) they've got your Paypal too. There's probably sufficient there to go about tracking you down - if they really wanted to.

Suddenly I have a lot of respect for Last.fm and the data they hold, because it doesn't come via our ISP's; these guys know that you've been listening to something that hasn't been released. So keep an eye on the terms and conditions for the membership kids.

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