Nielsen to Integrate "Top Swaps" P2P Download Data from BigChampagne -- Media ratings provider Nielsen Entertainment on Wednesday announced a partnership with Big Champagne, to integrate the company's peer-to-peer file-sharing network monitoring data into Nielsen radio airplay ratings. The addition will place data on top swaps alongside Nielsen's radio airplay data on the company's BDSRadio.com -- to provide record labels, artists and radio stations with a new source of information on music trends. "The linkage of Nielsen Entertainment's Actionable Entertainment Intelligence in music with Big Champagne's P2P charts is the beginning of a broader new landscape we plan to map, detailing the interrelationship between technology and consumption," said Nielsen Entertainment president and CEO Andrew Wing. Beverly Hills, California-based BigChampagne's data is culled from monitoring P2P networks like Kazaa, and is also syndicated by Entertainment Weekly and E! Entertainment Television.
Gartner's latest worldwide IT spending forecast exposes a trend every CIO has already felt in budget negotiations. Total spending will climb 14.2 percent in 2026, reaching $6.37 trillion. It seems that the IT infrastructure market is simply having a strong year. However, the more useful insight is how unevenly that growth is distributed. The Headline Number vs. The Real Story Data center systems and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are absorbing capital at a pace several multiples faster than devices, communications services, and traditional IT services. This is not incremental growth spread across a healthy portfolio. It is a wholesale reallocation of enterprise technology budgets toward AI infrastructure, made on the expectation that demand for AI workloads will justify the outlay before that demand has been fully proven. Where the Money is Going Data center systems are forecast to grow 62.5 percent in 2026, that's up from 51.6 percent growth in 2025, reaching $822 billion....