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: Musicians Praise BitTorrent and Creative Commons

FrostWire’s Angel Leon tells TorrentFreak that his company was not informed why FrostWire was suspended, but the first thought is that it has something to do with the recent settlement his company reached with the FTC.

Just before the weekend several news outlets reported that FrostWire and the FTC had settled their court case over privacy concerns. The government agency, which aims to protect the rights of consumers, alleged that FrostWire was disregarding users’ privacy by sharing files by default.

FrostWire agreed that this was a valid concern and based on pointers from the trade commission, updated its desktop and Android applications. These updates were actually carried out months ago, meaning that since then the application was no longer a concern for the FTC, hence the settlement.

“We fixed the app ages ago, and probably 99.9% of the userbase is actually running 0.6.3 (one generation over), so there shouldn’t be a hint of worry in regards to the FTC Complaints,” Leon said.

However, some reports in the media made it seem like FrostWire was still breaching users’ privacy, and this may have triggered Google’s decision to boot the app from the Android market.

Angel Leon notes that the worst part of it all is the lack of communication on Google’s part. Aside from a notice that the application had been suspended, the FrostWire team has received no information. It could be that the removal is totally unrelated to the FTC issue, but without a word from Google that’s impossible to confirm.

“It’s just plain wrong that you get suspended without ANY explanation or ANY notice, specially an app for which people have said they bought an Android for, and which has been installed on over 1 million devices during the last 12 months,” Leon says.

Attempts from both the developers and TorrentFreak to contact Google about the issue remained unanswered thus far, so there is no other option for FrostWire than to wait.

For now the FrostWire Android app can still be downloaded via the FrostWire website. However, the number of shared files has dropped dramatically since this setting was disabled by default.

In the coming weeks the FrostWire team will turn the Android app into a (more usable) BitTorrent client, as they’ve already done with the desktop version. The source of this new client will be released under a GPL license as soon as the first version is released.

Let’s hope that by then FrostWire will have been allowed back into the Android market.

Source: Google Boots FrostWire From Android Market, But Why?

This is one of the main reasons why the FTC filed a complaint against FrostWire at a federal court. The government agency, which aims to protect the rights of consumers, alleged that FrostWire was disregarding users’ privacy by sharing files by default.

Although some companies might view a looming lawsuit by the FTC as a massive problem, the FrostWire team approached the court case in a rather pragmatic way. The commission first contacted FrostWire in May, and by the end of the month the company had already delivered a version complying with the majority of the proposed changes.

“We are software people, and saw this as a bug fix that happened to be reported by the FTC,” FrostWire’s Angel Leon told TorrentFreak.

“Nobody as far as we know ever complained for having finished downloads shared by default, to us it was a given of P2P, but now we feel better that users are in full control of what’s being shared.”

FrostWire users could always prevent automatic sharing in just a click or two, but the FrostWire team understood the issues brought up by the FTC and quickly took action. By leaving Gnutella – which was little more than a spam farm after LimeWire shut down – FrostWire decided to become a BitTorrent-only client.

“We actually made our software compliant by making the allegations irrelevant once we dropped Gnutella. Now there’s no concept of ‘shared folders’ anymore and it’s pretty clear where all files are saved, and if the user is seeding or not,” Leon said.

FrostWire sees the FTC intervention as one of the most helpful bug reports in the company’s history.

“Thanks to this whole ordeal we made our application a lot better. In a matter of a couple of weeks, we had the last version of FrostWire 4.21.x fully compliant with the order, and then we just made the decision to go 100% with BitTorrent,” Leon says.

“With BitTorrent we feel that our users’ privacy is better protected than when we had Gnutella, and now they’re certainly immune to spam search results.”

Aside from the desktop application, FrostWire also has an Android app that runs on a separate file-sharing network developed by the company. For this mobile application the company changed the default settings so users have to opt-in before they share something.

As a result, the number of shared files dropped dramatically, so FrostWire will soon turn the Android application into a BitTorrent client as well. The source of this new client will be released under a GPL license as soon as the first version comes out.

Overall both the FTC and FrostWire are happy with how things worked out. Consumers on the other hand benefit from the relative privacy of BitTorrent, where no shared folders exist.

Source: “Going BitTorrent” Settles FrostWire’s FTC Charges

Last November The Pirate Bay shut down its own trackers, arguing that they have been made redundant by DHT and PEX. At the same time, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering Magnet links instead.

These are all interesting developments, but to really decentralize BitTorrent one has to take it up a notch. The way most torrent sites are setup makes them vulnerable to legal action from copyright holders, so the real solution might be to move away from web-based torrent indexes.

A rather primitive way to do this is to share torrents over another file-sharing network, and this is exactly what the Gnutella/BitTorrent client Frostwire has now made possible. Without any public announcement and stuffed away in the changelog of FrostWire’s upcoming release we find the following lines:

- New Feature: Gnutella Torrent Search. FrostWire now can search for .torrent metadata files in the Gnutella network.
- Upgraded feature: Optionally FrostWire will copy all .torrent meta files to a shared torrent folder.

Technically speaking these are just minor adjustments to the file-sharing application, but the implications could trigger a revolution in how torrents are shared in the future.

When FrostWire users start downloading a torrent with FrostWire, the client will keep and share the .torrent file on Gnutella. The idea is that as time goes by and more users download more torrents, even if torrent websites are shutdown, all the torrents will live on the P2P network forever.

To make it easier to find torrents on Gnutella, FrostWire also added a specialized “Torrent Search Mode”. As more users install this and later versions – and keep downloading more torrents – the richer these search results will be.

Now FrostWire only needs to offer support for trackerless torrents and they will have completely decentralized the BitTorrent operation with just a few simple adjustments.

Although we believe that FrostWire’s approach is interesting, it will also introduce one major problem. It is relatively easy to make a P2P-powered torrent index, but keeping it clean and malware-free will prove to be very difficult.

Most people might not even be aware of it, but one of the benefits of most torrent sites is that they remove thousands of torrents linking to spam and fake files every day. This will be much harder to do in a P2P-based environment, but not entirely impossible.

Over the last five years the Tribler BitTorrent client has been working on a decentralized torrent index that would make BitTorrent sites obsolete. Unlike simply sharing the torrent files among users, the upcoming release of the Tribler client has built in several spam control and moderation options that allow users to keep the network clean. In addition, newly created torrents can be shared with peers, instead of uploading it to a central server.

We don’t know if FrostWire has plans to implement similar moderation options, but they are absolutely required for a fully decentralized BitTorrent environment.

It will be interesting to see if the idea of a P2P powered and searchable BitTorrent index takes off. For now there are still plenty of good and reliable torrent sites out there, but with continued pressure from the entertainment industry they are not to be taken for granted.

Disclaimer: FrostWire is a TorrentFreak sponsor.

Source: BitTorrent’s Future? Decentralized Search and Hosting

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.

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.

Source: FrostWire P2P Client Starts Artist Promotion

In the past we’ve reported on the P2P advertising attempts of MediaDefender, but they are not the only company trying to make money from ads on filesharing networks. Last month, P2Pwords launched their adwords service, and more recently, PeerMatrix launched another advertising application targeted at P2P users. Although there is doubt that this type of advertising can be very effective, it’s the ideal cash cow for malware peddlers.

According to a press release from last Friday, PeerMatrix uses a “…revolutionary technology that morphs the name of an ad file to match whatever a P2P user is searching for, thereby dramatically increasing the probability that your ad file will be downloaded and viewed”.

In other words, with this (patented) “revolutionary technology” advertisers will have the possibility to rename their Viagra advert to ‘The Dark Knight Trailer.avi’, if that’s what the user is searching for. Even worse, the advertiser can do this with every file type, including executable malware applications, or trojan horses. The opportunities to use this piece of software to pollute search results are endless.

Angel Leon, lead developer at FrostWire told TorrentFreak that he is not impressed by PeerMatrix’s marketing pitch. Instead, he is worried. “We wouldn’t call this a “revolutionary technology,” he told us. “This is nothing but good old fake search results, otherwise known as spam, and it’s always been in the interest of the community to remove these results.”

PeerMatrix offers their application for free, and it runs on all recent Windows operating systems including Vista and XP. PeerMatrix’s business model is to make money by inserting a small percentage of their own ads along with the files that the ‘advertisers’ choose to spread.

We can’t help but see this application as the ultimate spamming tool. Luckily, most developers of Gnutella based filesharing applications agree with this view. “We’ll try our best to have FrostWire clients recognize these fakes and keep the experience clean, just the way it should be. If a search result doesn’t indicate in some way it’s an advertisement, it’s clearly a deceptive form of spam,” Leon said.

Bernard Trest, President of PeerMatrix disagrees with this description. “YouTube has also been experimenting with overlays and many websites use a similar overlay concept,” he told us. “Essentially the person does not request ads on YouTube however they are forced to view the ad anyhow. If what we are doing is “spam” then Google, Yahoo, and even YouTube are spamming.”

The problem with PeerMatrix, however, is that there is no control over the content that the advertisers put on the P2P networks, even executable files are not a problem. In addition, Trest admitted to us that the ads inserted by their software are not listed as ads in the search results. “The advertising, whether targeted or untargeted, is not designated as advertising,” he said.

If this isn’t the ultimate spamming tool, then what is? We sincerely hope that the developers of filesharing applications will keep a close eye on this new spamming tool, and filter it from the results wherever possible. If that proves to be a problem, many P2P users might have to switch to BitTorrent.

Source: Adwords for P2P, Advertising Opportunity or Spamming Tool?