Tens of thousands of musicians, from those just starting out to those already established, use BitTorrent to give away their music for free.

One of the BitTorrent clients that helps these artists to get noticed is FrostWire. In 2008, the client introduced its FrostClick service through which it promotes independent artists, and not without success.

With help from FrostWire, independent musicians reach a bigger audience than many of the artists signed by major labels. In the last year alone, 2.4 million people downloaded the albums promoted by FrostWire, and according to the artists who were featured, it pays off.

“FrostWire jumpstarted my music career by giving away my album for free to over 130,000 people,” says female rapper Kellee Maize in a comment. “Paying for that type of exposure would have cost me over $50,000 on other outlets such as taking out Facebook ads or Google Adsense.”

“Because of FrostWire I’ve accumulated over 100,000 Facebook and Twitter followers. During my FrostWire campaign, my website has received over 100,000 page views,” she adds.

Some of the critics of ‘free’ music say that it doesn’t convert to any sales at all, but Maize disagrees. The rapper says that thanks to releasing her music under a Creative Commons license through FrostWire, she’s now earning some decent money.

“I’ve been able to sell more albums on iTunes with this exposure and earn a sustainable income off of MP3 sales even though my music is part of Creative Commons,” says Maize.

She’s not alone either. Other artists that were promoted by FrostWire also praise the promotional success it gave them.

“We were truly delighted by the number of downloads we received after our EP was featured on FrostWire. It’s the most effective way we’ve found so far of getting the music out there,” says John from Azoora Feat. Graciellita.

This view is shared by Ryan Egan from The Ugly Club. “I never anticipated the kind of feedback we’ve received from music fans all over the world and it was a great decision to leave our record in the hands of the great people at FrostClick,” Egan says.

To celebrate 2.4 million downloads in 2011, FrostWire has released a compilation album as they also did in 2009. The A Side of the new album features 18 artists who’ve been promoted in the FrostWire client, and Side B is a hand-picked selection of 12 of the best artists who were featured on the FrostClick website.

All all the tracks are completely free to download and share. We’ve embedded Side A of FrostWire Creative Commons Mixtape below, and Side B is available here. For those who want more, here’s another 2.5 gigabyte compilation of some of the best Creative Commons music of 2011.

Enjoy.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

All featured artists get a 7 to 10 day feature on the welcome screen of the Frostwire client. The promotion includes a direct link to the album that users can download at their convenience. All albums are totally free and released under a Creative Commons license.

The service has been a great success thus far with between 35,000 and 100,000 downloads per album in just a week. It shows once again that BitTorrent can actually be a great tool for artists to promote their work, and build a larger fanbase.

To celebrate these great results, FrostWire has now released a compilation album featuring music from the 21 featured artists that achieved the first million downloads through the FrostClick project.

“In only 21 weeks we had our first 1,000,000 copies distributed, some artists reaching over 75 thousand downloads during their promotion, nowadays FrostWire artists can get over 100 thousand downloads during their runs on the FrostWire welcome screen,” the FrostClick team says.

Unlike most digital music albums, the compilation includes a very complete and high resolution virtual booklet. “For each artist we’ve included 2 high resolution booklet pages with information about the artist, song, license, number of downloads, facts and where available we’ve even put the lyrics of the song to sing along.”

More info on the compilation album, the torrent and the featured artists can be found on the FrostClick website.

Disclaimer: Frostwire is one of TorrentFreak’s sponsors.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.