Famous in China
OK, not really famous. Better to say "bootlegged in China," but I think this is kind of cool. Every now and then, I look at log files on the server where my mp3s reside to see if anyone is listening to the songs. Mind you, these aren't pretty charts or graphs; just raw server records that might look something like this:
xx.xx.xxx.xxx - - [17/Mar/2008:12:51:13 -0400] "GET /player/dep_noauto.xml
HTTP/1.1" 200 1336 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US;
rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12"
Using my mad h4x0r skillz, I can write little scripts to parse these and look for things like "how many visitors downloaded an mp3 in the month of March"; or "what's the most commonly downloaded song on my site."
While doing just such an analysis recently, I noticed that one song was rather more popular than any other. And I don't mean five percent more popular; I'm talking about five times more popular. Hmm, that's strange. I mean, I like that song just fine, but it's not like "Stairway to Freebird" or something. This would require some investigation.
I scanned the logs manually, looking for any pattern that might provide a clue. I didn't need Velma and a box of Scooby Snacks to discover the regular repetition of a single URL where the referring server should be: http://music.soso.com.
I typed the URL into a browser and it brought up a Chinese site that seems to be some kind of music clearing house. I saw what looked like a search box (I couldn't be sure since all the text was Chinese) so I typed in my name and hit enter. Sure enough, there was a link to my song Shudder, along with the helpful (if totally inexplicable) title "Anniversary."
Of course, if my song were an actual Chinese hit, it would generate as many downloads in a few minutes as I'm seeing in a month. But it's still pretty interesting to see what a little bit of bootlegging can do for your stats. So here's what my friends in Kunming are raving about:
