I do think there is some useful information to derive from the data, just haven’t worked it all out yet. I think I am taking a more broad view of the term value than just market price and that is where we are disagreeing on its potential utility.

Maybe I’ll convince you if I ever get around to publishing the next iteration

What the pirate is doing is tricking the busker to play a little longer (putting wooden nickels in his hat or something, I dunno), but it has a limit. While the price may be free-floating, (testing moment by moment the tolerance levels of the consumer and the producer for how much the music is worth and how much effort the musician is willing to expend to make it), a value exchange is still ocurring. When the pirate is theiving it, that process is negated. So, forget the artificial costs imposed by a government, the real cost is that eventually our busker will just starve on his feet or pack up his guitar and sell hamburgers. Now extrapolate that out about a billion times, adding in layers of CD production costs, promotion costs, distribution costs, buckets of ecstasy, and whatever else passes as a staple for the music industry these days, and I think you have a workable fable for what online piracy is doing to the music industry as a whole. It’s just a matter of scale.

So, my point is, yes, the fact that the Black Eyed Peas are being pirated more than my beloved Inspiral Carpets indicates that BEP music would have some theoretically higher value, it doesn’t begin to help determine what that value should mean price-wise because piracy makes price irrelevant. And since we don’t live in a barter economy, any other definition of value is just foo foo dust.

However, in the post I was toying with the idea that there is a stand-in for price with piracy, and that is the risk that pirates run. It isn’t an upfront cost, but rather one that participants take on since if they are caught they will have to pay some price (whether monetary, reputational, or some kind of incarceration). But, for the reasons noted, I don’t know if it would actually work.

End of the day, piracy data could provide some insight into popularity of a product (particularly measures of trends, buzz, etc), but from a value standpoint the price mechanism is still superior.