The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival, regarded as one of the largest and most popular in the US, has released its latest DRM-free, file sharing-safe collection of songs. Thanks to BitTorrent (and TorrentFreak which first reported the event), the comprehensive song selection has once again been included in a single torrent file, which is now available for download free of charge.
With this latest edition, SXSW music festival continues its much-acclaimed convention of publishing free tracks from participating artists, accounting for the distribution of thousands of quality songs since 2005. On multiple occasions in recent years, SXSW itself has been involved in encompassing festival song collections into single torrents for simplicity purposes and uploading them online. Since 2008, however, the public was asked to contribute in fulfilling this task.
Although the song list is quite extensive, setting up the torrent and uploading it online can be handled by one person alone, as all of the MP3 files are all gathered on SXSW’s website. While in 2008 this assignment was completed entirely by Greg Hewgill, Ben Stolt volunteered to do the same for the following song editions, in 2009 and 2010, respectively. So far, torrents created through the courtesy of SXSW have registered a huge success among online file sharers, accounting for more than 100,000 downloads.
The great thing about the tracks is that the artists themselves have approved them for distribution, which means that they can be downloaded without the risk of raising suspicions from the RIAA. This year’s first release comprises 646 tracks totaling 3.35 GB, but SXSW have promised to top that by making an additional 200 tracks available in the near future.
The torrent includes quality festival performances from all kinds of artists in a wide scope of music genres. If you are a music enthusiast looking for a free fix, then you should definitely give it a try.
This year’s highly anticipated SXSW music festival is scheduled to take place between March 17-21 in Austin Texas, so plan ahead and make sure you don’t miss it!
To get a better view on how the peer-to-peer scene is evolving with respect to what file sharing software people prefer to download, we keep you posted weekly with the latest numbers. So here’s a list with last week's top ten most downloaded p2p file sharing programs – the chart is based on figures published by Download.cnet.com and it refers to the number of times a p2p client was downloaded from their site (click on the names for download):
Week ended March 7
| P2P Client | Number of downloads (last week) | Number of downloads (total) | |
| 1.Limewire (current version 5.4.8) | 337,252 | 202,377,042 | |
| 2.BitComet (current version: 1.19) | 117,566 | 76,722,770 | |
| 3.Frostwire (current version: 4.20.3) | 86,351 | 27,698,142 | |
| 4.uTorrent (current version 2.0 build 17920) | 64,815 | 7,422,830 | |
| 5.Mp3 Rocket (current version 5.3.8) | 42,400 | 5,703,523 | |
| 6.ZapShares (current version 3.6) | 38,850 | 128,809 | |
| 7.BitTorrent (current version 6.4) | 31,131 | 16,219,471 | |
| 8.Vuze (current version: 4.3.0.4) | 12,977 | 7,166,619 | |
| 9.Ares Galaxy (current version: 2.1.5) |
|
753,240 | |
| 10. Limewire Pro (current version: 5.4.8) (buy) |
9,928 | 1,011,665 |
Filed under Announcements & Events, Downloads, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services, Tops by 
We’re back this week with the music chart posted by the guys at Kickasstorrents. The Music Top 5 presented here applies for this site alone and represents just a random selection from the most popular album downloads picked by the site’s crew.
# 1 this week is the release from Gorillaz – “Plastic Beach” followed by a new hit record by DJ Drama & Fabolous and also the latest album by Massive Attack which is not a stranger for this top. As it’s often the case with this chart, it also includes a top-notch discography – this time is Led Zeppelin’s.
Jimi Hendrix - Valleys of Neptune
Probably the most surprising apparition this week comes from a true legend of rock music – Jimi Hendrix with a NEW album (yeah, there’s no miswriting there, a new album launched in 2010!). According to jimihendrix.com website, the album includes:
- 12 previously unreleased studio recordings
- Features "Valleys Of Neptune," one of the most sought after of Hendrix's commercially unavailable recordings
- Includes exciting 1969 arrangements of classic signature songs "Red House," "Fire" and "Stone Free"
- Limited edition LP to be individually numbered out of 5,000 pieces and pressed by RTI in California
1. Gorillaz – Plastic Beach;
2. DJ Drama & Fabolous – There Is No Competition;
3. Massive Attack – Heligoland;
4. Led Zeppelin – Discography;
5. Jimi Hendrix – Valleys of Neptune;
