Music companies and others who have a product to sell (e.g., Coke) are using P2P as a marketing tool.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Jay-Z (who provided the material for half of the Grey Album and never thought of suing; btw, read this letter) is using peer-to-peer traffic to promote his tour and to sell Coke. It also turns out that P2P traffic can be an excellent vehicle for advertising for products musical and otherwise. Groups from Audioslave to Ice Cube are jumping on board, and Dashboard Confessional is insistent that P2P traffic took them from obscurity to fame and fortune.

Of course, the Grateful Dead were letting fans swap concert tapes for decades before HTML existed, and all that did was turn them into the most successful touring rock band ever. And the unauthorized sampling of old funk music by hip hop DJs has resurrected interest in dozens of long forgotten artists from the 60’s and 70’s.

P2P traffic helps musicians promote their music and is an unharvested billion-dollar ad venue? That’s NOT NEWS. (U2 had a master recording “stolen” in time for an album to hit the networks early, following the same move by Eminem and Wilco.) What IS news is that the big labels have finally begun to admit this, even if just a little bit.

If the labels had listened to EFF’s P2P proposals years ago, maybe they wouldn’t have had to sue their best fans and poisoned the well for years to come.