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.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.