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The Wall Street Journal reports that a Jay-Z video has been inserted into decoy files which are then uploaded to file sharing networks.

'The concept here is making the peer-to-peer networks work for us,' said Jay-Z's attorney, Michael Guido. 'While peer-to-peer users are stealing the intellectual property, they are also the active music audience.'

Jay-Z's promotion is backed by Coca-Cola, in return for a little advertising of its own within the video. The soft drinks giant said that the clip has already been downloaded 2.5 million times.

'It has so far exceeded our goals that you should look for us to do more,' says Katie Bayne, a Coke senior vice president.

Jay-Z is not alone, and it is not just video clips that are being distributed.

Artists 'put snippets of a song into

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the files with the promise that a stream of the entire song will be "unlocked" for everyone once the promotion is forwarded to enough people,' the WSJ says. 'The hope is that this will motivate people to send the file to lots of friends.'

Before their marketing potential was realised, the music industry had been distributing spoof files for some time, in an attempt to swamp genuine, albeit copied MP3s by replicating their hash signature.

The irony is not lost on p2pnet, a prominent critic of what it calls Organized Music.

'P2p file sharers are being vilified by the labels through the mainstream media, but they're still plenty good enough to be systematically targeted for sneak exploitation,' it writes.

P2P developers are also unimpressed. Many consider the viral marketing files to be spam and are updating their software in an effort to minimise its presence and effectiveness.

This is not the first time that the music industry has sought to capitalise on the popularity of p2p while simultaneously suing its developers and users.

US company Big Champagne revealed a year ago that it regularly prepares reports for labels, detailing the number of p2p users who are sharing a particular artist or song, which music those people are also buying and where they live.

The same company said this week that its latest survey of p2p usage recorded an average of more than nine million people online at any one time, over one million more than a year ago and 2.5 million more than in 2004.