Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Bundle Puts a Music Store Inside Torrents
An anonymous reader writes "BitTorrent has come up with a new way to sell music. It's called BitTorrent Bundle, and it puts the music store alongside the torrent. At last, someone has come up with a way to turn all us entitled, lawless downloaders into paying customers. BitTorrent thinks of BitTorrent Bundle as a sort of 21st century band flyer. Post a torrent with a handful of live tracks from your latest tour, Bundle it with a store that lets your groupies buy the full album."
Put simply, the idea is that bands publish a basic torrent with a few songs as a teaser. When users download that .torrent file from BitTorrent.com, they're shown a page asking for something — money, an email address, or social media interaction — in exchange for the rest of the album (or other bonus content). If they comply, they get a different .torrent file. It's not intended as a guard against piracy, but as a way to link up content creators with the torrenters who are actually willing to pay.
I've spent 50 bucks during the last week over "promo-torrents." I haven;t spent so much money on music since the Napster free-for-all.
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
If this isn't completely killed by the major publishers of art (music, movies, etc.) in the near term, then this could end up being a major distribution channel rivaling iTunes.
Imagine grabbing a torrent and having the option of directly paying the band, or having the option of going to the band's homepage or storefront for physical media or memorabilia. That would be pretty sweet. Of course, this could theoretically be subverted by bad actors (like people falsely representing others, the publishers themselves, or malware peddlers), so Bittorrent as the gatekeepers would have to be very careful about what they accept and not.
The bundles site itself is atrocious though. They really should be taking design cues from popular trackers and not the old Myspace pages of the artists they're featuring.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."