• The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Wednesday, October 18, 2006 12:45 PM

The music industry is taking a different tack than just suing individual downloaders and file-sharing services for music piracy on the Internet. It's joining them by planting fake--or "decoy"--files that contain promotional material. An eight-minute video clip from a Jay-Z concert at Radio City Music Hall, for example, includes promotions for Coca-Cola. It has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times.

Other music groups have placed snippets of a song into decoy files with the promise that a stream of the entire song will be "unlocked" for everyone once the promotion is forwarded to enough people.

Right now, only about 1% of the decoy files on peer-to-peer sites include promotions or ads, but the potential audience is huge. The typical downloader is the elusive tech-savvy male between the ages of 14 and 25.

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