BigChampagne, an online media measurement company, introduced its new BCDash product at South by Southwest this week. Until recently, BigChampagne could tell you how music was being downloaded in the p2p space. Imagine if you were a record label, and you wanted to know how a certain band was faring in the illegal download space (hypothetically, since your company no doubt screamed bloody muder about it being illegally shared when discussing such things publicly). You could go to BigChampagne and find out downloading trends and where your band was doing well; Wired ran an article on them 2 1/2 years ago. Now, BigChampagne can still help you, but they have augmented their data with sales information from the likes of iTunes, Wal-Mart, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music, AOL Radio, and Napster. The company's name comes from the idea of using the data to see what bubbles up to the top. On a song by song or band by band basis, one can see what's hot right now, without waiting for SoundScan data to arrive, which doesn't really track what people are listening to anyway. BCDash gives practically a real-time view into music trends, allowing, as the Wall Street Journal reports, record companies to adjust tours to give more exposure to a certain band in a specific locale, or to rapidly change a promotion.

[via FMQB]