BigChampagne
| Subsidiary | |
| Founded | U.S. (2000) |
| Headquarters | Hollywood, California |
| Parent | Ticketmaster |
| Website | BigChampagne.com |
BigChampagne is a technology-driven media measurement company. The BigChampagne dashboard is used primarily by music industry professionals such as concert promoters, radio programmers, managers, agents, and marketers to access information about the popularity of artists and songs across radio airplay, online streaming, social activity, sales, and live events. BigChampagne provides a number of services related to producing business intelligence (BI) and competitive intelligence (CI) for users of the dashboard via access to proprietary data and data management (integration and analysis) combined with web applications and other technologies.
BigChampagne was co-founded by Eric Garland, Adam Toll, and Zachary Allison in 2000. The company was funded entirely by the founders, without outside capital. Musician Glen Phillips was an early adviser and supporter. The company's earliest service tracked the popularity of songs on the original Napster file-sharing service.
Co-founder Adam Toll has said that the company was named for a lyric in the Peter Tosh song "Downpressor Man": "You drink your big champagne and laugh."
BigChampagne has courted some controversy; the company's early focus on Napster and other file sharing networks originally discouraged major music companies from working with them. In 2003, founder Eric Garland testified before the California State Senate that online file sharing was "fundamentally unstoppable." The Recording Industry Association of America publicly criticized his remarks. Beginning in 2002 BigChampagne was involved in a lawsuit with a company called Webspins. Both companies alleged defamation and unfair business practices. The suit was settled out of court in 2003 but the terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Also in 2003, Altnet, a distribution partner of file sharing service Kazaa, sent legal threats to BigChampagne and eight other companies alleging patent infringement. BigChampagne was dropped from the list of targeted companies almost immediately.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation hoped to use the record industry's relationship with BigChampagne to defend file sharing networks like Kazaa as they believed using the networks for market information constituted a non-infringing use of the networks. This defense proved unsuccessful.
...
Wikipedia