FrostWire P2P Client Starts Artist Promotion
Written by Ben Jones on December 10, 2008A common criticism leveled at most p2p clients is that they just ‘help people steal’, but they are actually a great tool to help promote undiscovered artists. This is exactly what FrostWire is trying to accomplish with their new FrostClick service. The results from their first featured artist are very promising.
One of the most common suggestions for artists to make money is to distribute tracks for free as a sampler, and earn money through value-added services like concerts or CDs with physical bonuses. While this is a potentially viable business model for established artists like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, the small or just-starting artist can find it hard to generate a big enough buzz.
That’s where sites like Jamendo and last.fm come in. Often they work in a relational way – “you like this, so we think you’ll like this…” – and can draw a number of new fans. However, it’s rare for peer-to-peer clients themselves to start promoting artists directly, but that’s what FrostWire has done.
Through their new welcome screen, FrostWire users were offered the 6-track album “Oh My” from Sean Fournier for download via BitTorrent. To make things even easier, streaming versions were also available to play, so the music could be sampled without even using the torrent. The key here is the simplicity. With one click, the songs could be played. With another click, the torrent for the songs was launched in the client, and the tracks downloaded.
FrostWire Promoting Sean Fournier
The question that first comes to mind is: Was it a success? Well, in the first weekend, there were over 25,000 downloads according to the FrostClick site. Now, there are over 32,000 completed, and over 1 terabyte of data transferred via BitTorrent. While it’s no longer being promoted, and due to the limited reach and knowledge of the torrent (to FrostWire users), the growth is still impressive.
The rulings involving peer to peer software over the past few years have directed p2p software companies from trying to build the best network for swapping your Madonna and Metallica mp3s, to ones that actively promote their ’significant non-infringing uses’. It may cost the company a little in bandwidth (for the streaming of the example tracks) but the cost of this is less than lengthy court cases around vicarious infringement. The goodwill generated is also a nice bonus, being known as a p2p client that actively promotes small artists is good publicity.
For artists, FrostClick is a unique opportunity to reach out to an audience of millions of music fans. Sean was impressed with the results of the campaign, stating on his blog “My downloads have spiked tremendously since FrostClick / FrostWire stepped in so I wanted to take time to thank everyone over there and let them know that I appreciate all the support! This is awesome!”
FrostClick’s Kademlia told TorrentFreak they want to promote people that could get signed. “We’ll be constantly looking for more professional independent content creators to give our users more legal alternatives and great media for free.” FrostClick is currently promoting Audra Hardt, and they have several other artists lined up for their free promotion service.
Disclaimer: FrostWire is one of our ’sponsors’. This article is written out of free will though, independent of any sponsorship.
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19 Responses
Seems interesting, Jamenda is a great place to get _free_ music. They have everycategory there! Why is it that FrostWire looks very similar to Limewire…? Using the same crappy Gnutella networking…
Its about time things like this were tried out.
Nicely worded artical ben, pitty that you don’t like writing – although i’m quite sure there wern’t 25000 thousand downloads. (edit: fixed)
@2 radio stations have been doing it for years
@4 Which ones? I always hear the same crap over and over when I turn the radio on the car, they’re almost spammy when they put the sames in rotation and play them back to back within the same hour.
Its would be great if artists could side step “commercial money hungry” record labels & do this, a new model has to be sorted out so the artist & the bit torrent client/site gets revenue from the amount of downloads but some how still delivering the content to the end user for free. Then it would be a case of, if the content was good it would be popular because it was well written not because its been advertised by “commercial money hungry” corporate companies that have “money hungry deals” with fizzy drink companies, fast food chains & the like
Then hopefully the monopoly of the riaa & record labels would be a thing of the past.
One less argument that the RIAA can use, but those bastards are going to put a spin on this too… for sure.
“radio stations have been doing it for years”
Really? For years now, radio stations have been using P2P clients to promote artists?
Damn, why didn’t I hear about this sooner…
nice advert. >_>
Even i downloaded both the albums from frostclick.
Hope they host some Heavy Metal artists
HUH? Doesn’t soulseek then also the same or something related like FrostWire?
It so, why soulseek is sued by the SPPF and why FrostWire not?
@10 We’ll try to rotate the genre, next one will be hip hop. We have some candidates for Metal too.
Any unsigned band suggestions are welcome.
Wow, FrostWire totally ROCKS!! Thats some cool stuff.
Jess
http://www.online-privacy.se.tc
@12, We’re not really metal (more like loud garage rock), but I hope you’ll consider my band, Darkfold, for your next promo!
Find us on Jamendo: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/Darkfold
Even i downloaded both the albums from frostclick.
Hope they host some Heavy Metal artists
http://www.torrenthub.org – Mininova Cloned (for when its slow or down AGAIN!)
PLS Click: http://www.iHateCandy.de.gp/
“A common criticism leveled at most p2p clients is that they just ‘help people steal’”
Oh wow, really? I thought p2p clients were invented just to download latest Linux builds (yeah yeah, Windows will be dead and whatever..).
Also, these artists if ever end up releasing a book or those nice Gnomon like tutorial videos, good luck stopping people from pirating it all. Expose yourself using blogs and art sites, not a ***** piracy software that (mostly) everyone uses NOT to pay for stuff (really, why bother promoting yourself to such crowd?).
‘Its about time things like this were tried out.’
mate try 8yrs ago on Audiogalaxy
Do people still actually use Limewire/Frostwire? Last time I used that piece of garbage was over a year ago and all the search results were either viruses or if you didn’t pay attention youd a fake music file with that stupid ass guy doing the Bill Clintion voice saying “join e-free club!!!”
Limewire BLOWS.
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