Experiments with making music available on the popular music-oriented private BitTorrent tracker site.
Keith Novak, a self-described “percussionist/songwriter/audio engineer/web designer/avid video game player” currently studying Music Recording Technology at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, PA, has decided to make his latest album “Discongruence” available for free download on Waffles.fm, the popular music-oriented private BitTorrent tracker site.
Novak, whose band is named MiTiDo, decided to share his music on BitTorrent in order to increase his exposure among music fans.
“So, I wanted to get some more exposure for some of my music,” he writes on his blog. “Sometimes it just feels good to get your name circulating around the internet and whatnot.”
He sees the upside to BitTorrent being that he can distribute his music instantly for free and bypass record labels and the associated costs of marketing, distribution, etc..
“Why this is a cool idea: I get exposure,” adds Novak. “People get free music. BitTorrent can be used as a legal means to distribute my music, as it seems to get a lot of wrap as a piracy-only tool.”
The Waffles.fm page he created to host the album’s torrent tracker also links to his site so that fans of his work can show support by paying $6.99 for a copy of “Discongruence” or other albums of his as well.
“So if I do manage to get a fan out of any of the leechers, they can follow up my works with similar things I’ve worked on,” he says.
So far the response has been tepid with a total download count of 17, including my own, but hopefully that may change. He’s not the first artist to do it, but it does show Novak’s thinking out side the box and trying to put his work in the hands of music fans where it belongs. How else would he be able to distribute his music from the “middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania (the northeast portion)?”
If you’re lucky enough to have a Waffles.fm account search for “MiTiDo – Discongruence.”
I’m downloading a copy now. I’ll give you a review when I get a chance.
Stay tuned.
jared@zeropaid.com
UPDATED:
I had a chance to catch up with Keith and ask him a few questions.
How has the response been so far?
The response has been minimal so far, but I have a good feeling about putting all my music onto torrent websites. People will always like to grab free new music when possible, and it helps me out because when people do come to my website, I can direct them to a torrent site when they want to download one of my albums, saving me bandwidth.
Have you seen any increase in the number of albums people have purchased?
No, but I use a service called CDBaby, which puts my music on a lot of digital retailers like iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, as well the CDBaby website. I’ll need to wait a month or so until I actually find out any numbers.
Anything else you’d like to mention?
Yes! I’d like to mention that on my CD Baby page (http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/mitid) you can purchase individual songs (you can also do that on iTunes and similar services). I don’t sell physical CDs at the moment. Also, I hope this goes to show that Bit Torrent isn’t always about stealing music. Luckily, people have begun to see the light of the protocol, and they have begun to realize that it can be used as a powerful tool for sharing files legally, as in this case.
(THX Keith!)
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Thanks for the free publicity and ego boost, I truly appreciate it!
I feel like I have been years ahead of the curve here. I started posting my music on P2P towards the end of 2005. These days, many other artists find themselves doing similar things.
Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a few years to establish your online presense as an artist, but once you are there, getting hundreds or thousands (or in my case, hundreds of thousands) of downloads becomes easier.
Waffles has been promoting artists for a while now. I had my bands EP featured on the front page and available for free leech, had around 2,500 people download it.
I put some of my albums up at What.cd and on my blog @ davwuh.wordpress.com and got about 1000 downloads, its a good way to aquire a small fanbase as an upcoming artist
I think its a great idea. Unfortunately just uploading it might not get a lot of publicity. If you want to upload something you created, you should talk to staff. They can get you free advertising and publicity on the site. Doing that will probably get you at least 1k downloads.