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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.
At least somebody is thinking creatively about the music situation, instead of just whining and wishing for the "old days" to come back.
Of course, those wedded to the erstwhile status quo (major labels) will crap themselves. Or try to sabotage and/or badmouth the idea.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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
Underestimating the artists themselves as most don't have more than 2-3 good songs an album anyways.
To be fair, with nobody buying physical CDs, organizing songs into albums is only a tradition now.
I disagree. Half the stuff I torrent is just because it's more convenient than the crappy "approved" distribution models. If I *really* like what I torrent, I wait until it's available commercially (see, Game of Thrones, Walking Dead) and buy the box sets after I watch/listen to the torrents. If I sort-of like it, I won't bother seeking it out after the fact, and if I don't like it, I delete it. This seems like a good way to get me to throw them a few dollars even if it's in the "sort of like it" category, because of the convenience.
People want to pay back in a way or another to the artists that do something they like, just not the corporation that is in the middle and keeps most of the benefits for itself and throws just a bone to the artist in by far most of the cases. And want freedom too, not the "you can hear/see/read this where i say, when i say, and how i say" corporate motto. Is a combo of DRM free and reaching the final artist.
The problem is, if proves to be successful, it will be exploited by others too, from corporations that will again keep the money for themselves, or by scammers.
Apparently some MBA finally figured out that "peer-to-peer downloading for free" means (FREE) "peer-to-peer marketing".
The product (bits that encode music) is not scarce. Consumer attention is very scarce.
An ever increasing amount of content competes for a precious foothold in a consumer's attention span.
Trying to prosecute "illegal downloaders" is being penny wise and pound foolish.
Trading a non-scarce resource for a scarce one is always a win.
I would never buy from Apple, or any big record studio, but I would buy from independent musicians through torrent. I would even pay far in excess of market prices to the ones I like.
...organizing songs into albums is only a tradition now.
Its still used as filler to bulk up their product.
While this may be true for your typical pop artists, it does not hold true for the seasoned artists that release concept album . These are albums where a number of songs are used to tell a story - much like a musical.
Examples of this include Muse The Resistance, Tokyo Jihen Just Can't Help It, and Gotye Making Mirrors. If you ever want to completely lose yourself into music, I recommend seeking these out.
[Rent This Space]
Underestimating people by thinking that they won't download the next link down, which is the completely free pirated album.
You are somewhat correct... offering more of what you just got for free is dumb as hell. But the rest of the ideas are solid... "Follow us on facebook for the rest of the album" or better yet, Query the users IP, search your Concert ticket database and offer them a chance to pre-order tickets for a show. You could literally book your entire tour based on pre-ordered ticket purchases and then just refund those areas that didn't get enough sales. Most wont give you a dime, but some will... and that's a lot better than nothing.
Underestimating the RIAA's greed that they would actually agree to this.
I think we all know the only place the RIAA is relevant is in the retirement accounts of the congressmen they've bought.
Underestimating the artists themselves as most don't have more than 2-3 good songs an album anyways.
And with this, you've missed one of the most important points of Peer to Peer file sharing. It's the ultimate a-la-carte menu. I no longer am forced to buy crap I don't want. There was a time when a band could purchase a song written by some washed up rockstar that would be so popular that they'd put it on a $17CD and rake in the cash because so many people would buy it for that one song... no more. This is good for music.
That's that thing for people with apple devices, right? That thing that doesn't run on Linux, and barely runs on Windows (and as such is unusable enough that I won't install it) and is the main reason why I don't own an iPhone or an iPad? Yeah, I've heard of it.
I also haven't much interest in it, when I can (and do) get much of the same content from Amazon. The PC I browse on is separate than the server I store media on is separate from the device(s) I watch media on -- I don't fit into Apple's box. I'm not hating on the people who do, I'm just not one of them. If it works for you, then I'm glad you found a solution you're happy with. For me, that solution is torrent first and pay later.
I end up playing the Game of Thrones every time I take too much milk of magnesia...
The only correct way to correctly make a bittorent store is to make it the entire album, and then just ask for money.
This torrent will be beside full packages, why would you download the gimped one? And if I wanted to pay for the music I would pay at a store so I could direct download instead of having to deal with all the extra torrent stuff.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.