[LINK] $60 million music piracy operation

[Robin Whittle]

Hi Richard,

I totally agree this $60M stuff is pie-in-the-sky stuff.  My message was
at a tangent to the discussion, not in any way disagreeing with the
seeming impossibility of any small outfit doing enough business with
physical discs to be scaled to that value.  

Maybe if they did quite a lot of downloads, but still that's a lot.  

A 1 hour CD is 60 Megabytes as an MP3 download.  $60M is 2 million CDs
at $30 each - worth is 120,000 Gigabytes.  Over 3 months that's 40,000
Gigabytes a month.  At 80% utilisation, that means a link which does
50,000 Gigs a month flat out, which is . . . 154Mbps.

The lowest cost bandwidth I know is 400 Gigs for USD$100:

   http://www.rackshack.net

and that is in Texas.  The cost here would be vastly higher.  At the
Rackshack rate, via downloads, a CD costs the server USD$0.015 so as a
business it could be a nice little earner - but I just question the
number of downloads.  Maybe they counted "hits" as CD downloads and the
site was one of those pernicious things which looks like the inside of a
casino and uses dozens of files tiled for each major graphic.

 - Robin