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.

Comments

At least...

[AliasMarlowe]

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.

Re:At least...

[steelfood]

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.

Re:At least...

[PopeRatzo]

At least somebody is thinking creatively about the music situation

Unfortunately, it's not the musicians, but people with MBAs looking for ways to continue to profit from other peoples' work.

The solution to "the music situation" is not technical. The "music business" was an aberration, an artifact of corporatism, having nothing to do with music. It treated music as a commodity, and artists as tangential figures at best.

Best to let it die. Musicians will continue to make music, and they'll figure out a way to make a living doing so. And they'll do it by thinking creatively, which is what they're supposed to be good at.

My opinions are based on experience, having made about 1/3 of my income over the past 20 years as a musician, and the past eight years completely outside the bounds of the "music business".

My spouse hates this idea...

[flogger]

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.

Re:A huge underestimate of people's nature

[Aaron B Lingwood]

...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.