BitTorrent Promotes: The Boxer Rebellion

June 5, 2013 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Downloads, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services

BitTorrent’s Monday Download series introduces this week The Boxer Rebellion, a rock band formed in London in 2001 by Nathan Nicholson, Todd Howe, Adam Harrison, and Piers Hewitt. Since we’re so fond of sharing and so happy when it also comes to mean supporting and promoting creative people, we too wanted to let you know about these guys and the download they put out there for everyone to enjoy

In Jan 2009, they self-released their second album, Union. It went on to become iTunes’ Alternative Album of the Year. The Boxer Rebellion became the first ‘unsigned’ band to break the Billboard Albums 200 on a digital-only release. With Union, The Boxer Rebellion made a statement about the state of rock: you can be independent, and successful. And they set a precedent for music’s next wave.

Over the years, they’ve kept moving; following up Union with The Cold Still, and a compilation of b-sides and rarities. Says drummer Piers Hewitt: “We always want to progress musically, and never make the same record twice; having learnt so much since we decided to do things on our own terms, and on our own label.” Promises, their newest album, debuted earlier in May on the band’s own Absentee Recordings label. And it marks yet another evolution for the band: provocative, emotional, and uplifting – a rewrite of the independent rock canon.

We’re partnering with The Boxer Rebellion to distribute tracks from Union and The Cold Still exclusively to BitTorrent fans. Because direct-to-fan is a powerful thing. According to Hewitt:

“Our fans are our life-blood. We know plenty on a first-name basis and we see them and hang at the merch stall after gigs, just like we did all those years ago. The only difference being that now there’s a whole lot more of them… from Tokyo to Mexico City. It’s truly a beautiful thing.”

We expect that there will be a lot more of them now.

Get the BitTorrent Bundle, and you’ll get three tracks from Union, and three tracks from The Cold Still LP. Open the text file inside the Bundle, and find out how to unlock the rest of the The Cold Still LP for a limited time only.

(via BitTorrent Blog)

Get the BitTorrent Download: The Boxer Rebellion

BitTorrent Promotes- The Boxer Rebellion

Tags: BitTorrent, digital music, free music downloads

Free Music Downloads: Today’s Treat

May 20, 2013 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Downloads, Entertainment Industry, Movies, MP3, Digital Audio & Games

Free downloads for music lovers is like candy for kids so we thought to scoop up such free releases and spread the word about them as often as we can here at P2PON. This section will compile reports taken from various sources just to keep you posted with the latest free music downloads made available by emerging or consecrated artists (and includes, of course, links for free downloads).

Dorians

Dorians Fly album is available for free download on the group’s official web site.

The decision to make Fly album free for downloading was made taking into account the growing interest to the band’s activity both in Armenia and abroad.

Dorians will represent Armenia in Eurovision song contest second semi-final on May 16. (via Panorama)

Alex Day

Last month, Youtube hero and DIY artist Alex Day kicked off a collaboration project with BitTorrent fans. He posted stems from his Epigrams and Interludes tracks to SoShare. You guys picked them up, and made them yours. Awesome. This playlist has pretty much become our favorite thing on the Internet. (We’re probably not alone – these videos have been watched over 31 thousand times.)

The winning track, as decided by Alex: Tess Beighton’s remix of Forever Yours. It adds edge and originality; it comes from the same feeling and place as the original. It’s pretty epic, and we’re reminded again how amazing songs can sound in the hands of fans. On behalf of BitTorrent: congrats! You can find more from Tess here. (via BitTorrent blog)

Free Download Of Stone Temple Pilots New Song Out Of Time

KROQ’s Weenie Roast always brings a surprise guest, and Saturday’s (May 18) show was no exception. The concert put together two huge names for an unexpected performance: Stone Temple Pilots with Linkin Park‘s Chester Bennington. The group premiered their new single, “Out of Time,” on stage. (via detroit.cbslocal.com)

You can download “Out of Time” for free here.

Tags: digital music, downloads, free music downloads

Spotify Fixed A Vulnerability That Allowed Its Users To Download Songs For Free

May 10, 2013 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Movies, MP3, Digital Audio & Games

With more than 24 million registered users, Spotify is clearly the number one music streaming service out there. Their security system, however, proved to be vulnerable to a Google Chrome extension called “Downloadify”, which allowed users to download songs for free.

Although Google had the extension removed from their “extensions list”, Downloadify was still available on other websites. Contacted by the BBC, the music streaming service confirmed that the vulnerability had been fixed, and everything is ok.

For those of you who are curious enough to ask “who came up with the idea of such an extension?”, we provide with the answer. It was a Dutch developer called Robin Aldenhoven who tweeted that:

“I could not believe it myself that they did so little to protect their library,” he said.

Despite his finding, the developer later tweeted that he has no intention of compromising the service.

“Spotify = awesome… so I don’t want to damage them,” he wrote.

Spotify, however, is not the only one that’s been a subject to such exploits. YouTube, for example, has the same problem. There are plenty of services out there which allow anyone to download and/or turn YouTube videos into mp3s.

“You are committing an infringement,” Sheena Sheikh (a solicitor from intellectual property specialists Briffa) told the BBC.

“You’re not authorised to download the songs. You don’t have permission,” she continued.

It is still unknown, and will probably remain as such, how much damage Downloadify did.

Tags: digital music, downloadify, music streaming service, Spotify, vulnerability

“Bundle” By BitTorrent: A Place Where Peer-To-Peer And Legitimacy Work Together

May 8, 2013 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Digital Media, Mobile Phones, P2P technology, Downloads, Entertainment Industry, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services, Movies, MP3, Digital Audio & Games

BitTorrent Inc. is once again proving that its intentions to legitimize peer-to-peer are genuine. Yesterday, the company announced the workings on a brand new project called “BitTorrent Bundle”, a place for people to access a completely changed .torrent format (one that includes free content), and for content creators to promote and make money out of their creations. Interested? Keep reading…because it gets better.

It’s the season of innovation, and BitTorrent Inc. is rolling one project after the other, all for the sake of not just their community, but also for the entertainment industry. Out of their attempts to push the peer-to-peer technology towards legitimacy, Bundle Alpha was born, a web-based project that aims to unite the two sides into a buffer zone by providing with a different type of torrent, while promoting and selling for artists.

The Bundle Alpha has already been put to the test; the file-sharing company shook hands with a popular music label called “Ultra” (a platform for artists such as David Guetta, DJ Tiesto, deadmau5, and Calvin Harris). The two offered a torrent bundle that contains behind-the-scenes music, videos, and a “digital tour booklet” from Kaskade (an established electronic music band).

“The strategy here is to give content creators the tools to publish into the ecosystem on their own,” BitTorrent’s director of communications, Christian Averill, said.

“We’re creating a new kind of torrent, the gated torrent, and the idea is that this will be pervasive once it gets out there.”

Yesterday, BitTorrent’s official blog made public its goal to provide “a distributed technology solution for creators…. Our goal is to move the interaction to where it matters, making it a property of the file versus the distribution framework (and) giving artists real data about — and real access to — their fans.”

And speaking of fans, BitTorrent’s community is, the least to say, impressive (more than 170 million users from all over the world), a figure that consists not just of pirates, but also people who are willing to find and pay for content. Legal content, that is.

“Many people don’t realize that we have over 2 million pieces of licensed and legal content available in our ecosystem,” Matt Mason said.

“It is true that our technology is exploited as part of a stack of technologies used for piracy. But you’ll find that as a standalone tool we are not a very good piracy tool. We don’t rip CDs or capture movies on camcorders. We don’t host content that infringes on copyright, we don’t index it, point to it or promote it in any way. All of those things happen outside of BitTorrent.”

A look under the Bundle’s hood reveals that the platform works about the same as uTorrent or the BitTorrent client (technically speaking). However, if you look deeper, Bundle is not just a web-based file-sharing platform, but also a bridge towards legal/premium content. How you manage that content is entirely up to you and the content creator. For example, in Kaskade’s case, you will be required to provide with an e-mail address. The alternatives include pay gates, external links towards services such as Netflix or iTunes, and pay-for-what-you-need “gates”.

BitTorrent Kaskade Bundle

Simply put, the Bundle offers more power for content creators and rightsholders to promote, control, and sell their works.

It seems that BitTorrent’s past efforts to go legit, and collaborations with artists such as Vikram Gandhi, Stacy Peralta, Tim Ferriss, Death Grips, and Counting Crows (these are just few of the names that came across BT and shook hands with the “devil”) are finally taking shape .

“When we learned that the BitTorrent protocol is used by over 170 million users, all of whom are avid consumers of entertainment and music and whom purchase 30 percent more of that content than average, we knew we wanted to reach out to them and engage them in our indie film,”Jill Calcaterra – Chief Marketing Officer at BitTorrent – said.

“This was an opportunity to engage a huge fanbase from the onset by giving them something unique and exclusive early on, with the hopes that in return they will support the film [Arthur Newman] through its lifecycle. Being an indie, I think we are more nimble than most and more willing to try and pilot new programs. The entertainment business is moving at a remarkable pace and we want to keep up and stay in front of opportunities.”

She continued by saying that the promotion was a complete success, gathering “hundreds of thousands of downloads” in just 24 hours (the first seven minutes of the movie were made available on BT’s networks).

“We are also tracking the redirects to our website, monitoring social media and the overall conversation around the film, all of which is up since we launched with BitTorrent,” she added.

All good, but this is the beginning of a long road BT will have to undertake in order to enter the golden realm of legitimacy.

“We find that once we do sit down and talk, there is a better understanding of how to work together,” Matt Mason explained.

“No other medium offers as good of a way for content creators to engage directly with their fans in a way that BitTorrent can,” he concluded.

You can download Kaskade’s bundle here.

Tags: BitTorrent, BitTorrent Bundle, digital music, file sharing service, file-sharing, p2p, p2p technology

Free Music Downloads: Today’s Treat

April 16, 2013 by Yonah · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Downloads

Out to claim his Southern rap throne, Mississippi emcee Big K.R.I.T. drops his long awaited mixtape King Remembered in Time this week. Seizing creative control, the 17 track album is mostly produced and penned by the underground phenom and is completely free. He teams with mega-producer 9th Wonder on “Life is a Gamble” and collabs with fellow vet Bun B. and collabs with fellow newcomers Wiz Khalifa, Trinidad James, Future, and BJ the Chicago Kid.

K.R.I.T. definitely delivers on this mixtape and shows off his unique talent of mixing the ratchet, trunk popping tunes with intellectually witty rhymes. Be sure to the download the free tape below and grab your tickets to his upcoming West Coast tour, starting this May. (via thekoalition.com)

Download Mixtape

Tags: digital music, downloads, free music downloads