Record companies - resorting to P2P escapology?

News today that tracks from Robbie Williams' latest album are appearing on peer-to-peer file sharing sites certainly seems to have caused a ripple of excitement among his legions of young fans and the media alike.

Sneak previews of his latest album songs, courtesy of Morpheus and KaZaA, in these days of copyright crackdowns, may even sound too good to be true. And that'll probably be because it is, as the files purporting to be sneak preview tracks have turned out to be either decoy empty files, or mere snippets which played for around 30 seconds.

With Williams' record label, EMI, remaining tight-lipped over the situation, it falls to the press to ponder as to the whys and wherefores of an issue which is part of a much bigger picture.

Suggestion one - probably the most likely - seems to be that the record companies are fighting the peer-to-peer services by filling them with dummy files, discrediting them with an influx of broken links and empty promises, thus reducing the risk of people noticing should legitimate files start appearing online.

Suggestion two, with regards to the 30 second clips, is that it's all a PR stunt - with EMI distributing teasers in a viral fashion, in the same way film studios provide movie trailers in an email friendly format. After all, no complete song files have reportedly been swapped, no copyright infringed - therefore no harm done - and now everybody knows there's a new Robbie Williams album imminent, whether they care or not.

Either way, or it may even be a combination of the two, such incidents appear to mark the dawn of a new relationship between the file sharing community and the record labels.

EMI and its record industry peers have either cottoned on to the fact that, despite an early victory over Napster, the legal fight to clamp down on file sharing is evading them, and they are now resorting to guerrilla tactics to defend their royalties.

Alternatively they have realised the file sharing community is a large and active demographic ripe for targeted advertising - and subsequent free PR (in articles such as this, and those on the BBC, Reuters and other esteemed sources). In short they are going to exploit the peer-to-peer world until they can crush it.

Whatever the truth behind these phantom files, it certainly shows the record labels have started to think beyond the blinkered 'file sharing must die' mentality which characterised the legal posturing of the past few years.

It at least shows they now know something about the medium, how it works, and where its strengths and weaknesses lie. 'Know your enemy', as the saying goes.