BitTorrent Bundle Puts a Music Store Inside Torrents 78
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, those wedded to the erstwhile status quo (major labels) will crap themselves. Or try to sabotage and/or badmouth the idea.
Finally! (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:At least... (Score:4, Insightful)
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".