To help this group the site launched The Promo Bay last year and many artists have profited from a banner on the site’s frontpage since. Every weekend The Pirate Bay showed off one or more content creators to its millions of visitors, until last August when the project was suddenly halted.

The Promo Bay team informed us that due to personnel changes they could no longer continue the promo platform, but said that it may return in the future. And so it happened. After a three-month hiatus a reimagined version of The Promo Bay relaunches today.

The new promo platform is currently promoted by a banner on The Pirate Bay’s frontpage. The main difference is that the site is no longer restricted to artists – activists, startups, charities and other groups are also welcome to join.

Promo Bay coordinator Will Dayble felt that the focus on “content creators” was too narrow and he and his team used the break to expand the project’s reach.

“The main goal of the new Promo Bay is to draw attention to disruptive things happening around the world. Art, activism, charity, startups, the weird and wonderful, the game changers and indie,” Dayble tells TorrentFreak.

“We’re shifting how we work, play interact, speak, live and fall in love. Hopefully, we can reveal some of the good stuff to a wider audience,” he adds.

In addition to the broadened scope The Promo Bay also wants to open source their code. They further hope to add an option to track the impact of their promotion campaigns through in-swarm monitoring of the numbers of downloads and download locations.

“We’re in talks with another Aussie startup that does in-swarm monitoring, for more complex measurement of our impact,” Dayble says. More news on these future improvements will be announced later, first the Promo Bay needs some fresh submissions.

Do you have something to plug? Head over to the new Promo Bay and perhaps your idea will soon be in front of millions of Pirate bay visitors.

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

The real challenge is to escape obscurity and get noticed by the public.

To help artists get noticed, The Pirate Bay rolled out a new promotion platform last year. Through The Promo Bay the site offered artists a prime advertising spot on the site’s homepage, replacing the iconic logo, for free.

In the weeks that followed more than 10,000 artists signed up for a feature, nearly all musicians. A few dozens of these have been promoted over the past year, generating millions of page views and in some cases even a healthy stream of revenue.

But despite these successes The Promo Bay hasn’t been featuring any new artists in recent weeks.

Tobias Andersson, one of the original founders of The Pirate Bay who came up with the idea for the promotion platform, has left the ship and at the moment there is no-one around to take his place.

Will Dayble, who manages the separate Promo Bay site, hasn’t been in touch with The Pirate Bay crew but stresses that the site will remain online. Artists can still submit their content to the site, and Dayble hopes that TPB or another site will soon help out on the promotion side again.

Tobias Andersson told TorrentFreak that he is indeed moving on with other things, and he isn’t holding back on his criticism of the current Pirate Bay crew either.

“The Pirate Bay not continuing with The Promo Bay is just more evidence of the site going stale. It’s not the rebellious, energetic and progressive site it once was. It’s bloated with ads, more than ever, worse than ever. Nothing is said, nothing is done,” Andersson says.

Despite being the largest file-sharing site on the Internet, Andersson believes that The Pirate Bay has lost its edge in recent years.

“It’s just another site. Which is sad since it once was something completely different. It didn’t used to be just a site, it was a concept of a better Internet. Sure, most people only want the site for Hollywood movies and mainstream music. But any site could do that. There are hundreds of sites like that.”

The Pirate Bay crew disagrees with Andersson and says that the Promo Bay initiative isn’t dead yet. They will try to find someone to handle the artist contacts and get the project running again in the future.

Andersson nonetheless reiterates what he said before, that closing down the site may be the best option.

“I see no value in TPB continuing. The best thing would be if it shut down now, to mark ten years of resistance, resiliency and a stance for the free Internet,” he says.

The Pirate Bay, however, shows no sign of stopping. Despite heavy criticism from several of its founders, the site keeps expanding its user base month after month while continuing the development of several anti-censorship tools.

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

The website is entirely dedicated to promoting the work of independent musicians, filmmakers and other content creators. Through The Promo Bay these artists get to showcase their work to an audience of hundreds and thousands of people at no cost.

Unfortunately, however, artists in the UK and Finland were unable to submit their content after the site was blocked by their Internet providers due its affiliation with The Pirate Bay.

Recognizing this error, music industry group BPI instructed the UK’s ISPs to unblock the site. However, The Promo Bay remained blocked in Finland, until now.

Representing EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music and Warner Music, a representative from the Finnish Anti-Piracy Centre got in touch with the Promo Bay a few days ago, to ask whether site is indeed a legal operation.

“The interesting thing was that we didn’t ask them to,” Promo bay’s Will Dayble tells TorrentFreak.

The anti-piracy group mentions in their email that The Promo Bay domains are blocked because they were directly linked the The Pirate Bay in the past.

The anti-piracy group asked Dayble to confirm the legitimate nature of the site, and said it would then ask the court to unblock the domains “to allow digital consumers access to new legal alternatives to enjoy exciting new music.”

Needless to say, Dayble was pleasantly surprised by the inquiry.

“They went to the effort to find my personal email and get in touch. This means that someone at the Finnish anti piracy group is either being as diligent about things that aren’t piracy as those that are, or we have a kind soul out there annoying the powers that be on our behalf,” Dayble tells TorrentFreak.

After explaining what the Promo Bay is about, and assuring the Finnish labels that no copyright infringement is taking place through the service, it obtained the music industry’s blessing. Albeit with reservation.

“Your message clarified the legal aspects of your service. Although we do express our concern with regard to your partial cooperation with The Pirate Bay, which is an illegal service and whose operators have been convicted in Sweden, we have decided to remove Promo Bay from the said domain name list,” the Anti-Piracy Centre wrote.

The above means that the music labels do understand that some artists see value in getting promoted by The Pirate Bay. Quite a breakthrough if you think about it.

After a delay of a few months Finnish artists can now finally join The Pirate Bay promo bonanza. However, while magnet links to music are available on The Promo Bay, artists featured by The Pirate Bay can never see their own promos in full as The Pirate Bay’s main website remains blocked.

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

The website is entirely dedicated to promoting the work of independent musicians, filmmakers and other content creators. Through The Promo Bay these artists get to showcase their work to an audience of hundreds and thousands of people at no cost.

A great initiative, but unfortunately many UK artists were unable to submit their content after the site was blocked due its affiliation with The Pirate Bay.

In a response to this news a petition was started by The Promo Bay asking the UK’s Internet providers to reconsider their decision. In addition, the UK’s Open Rights Group (ORG) and Virgin asked the local music industry group BPI to review the blockade.

Today these efforts paid off.

Responding to ORG’s inquiry the BPI said that they instructed ISPs to lift the block. The group explained that the Promo Bay domain was blocked as part of the UK High Court decision earlier this year because it previously linked to the Pirate Bay website.

While this is great news for the Promo Bay and the many artists who want to promote their work through the Pirate Bay, it also raises same concerns. For example, why should a music industry group be in control of an Internet blocking list?

ORG agrees that the incident is worrisome and the group is calling for more transparency and oversight.

“The incident is rather revealing: it firstly shows that there is a significant need for greater transparency about the nature of blocking injunctions. Secondly, it shows that the BPI have been given a great deal of discretion over what may be blocked.”

“Neither ISPs nor the BPI seem keen to disclose what is on the list. It is effectively secret,” ORG adds.

The Pirate Bay crew is happy to see the Promo Bay unblocked, but believes the BPI can do even more.

“It’s great that our friends from the BPI are so kind to use their God-like powers to get the Promo Bay off the blocklist. Apparently they realize how important it is for artists to be able to get featured on The Pirate Bay frontpage,” Pirate Bay’s Winston told TorrentFreak.

“Too bad these artist are not able to see their own promotions though, because our main page is still censored,” he adds.

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

The website is entirely dedicated to promoting the work of independent musicians, filmmakers and other content creators. They get to showcase their work to an audience of hundreds and thousands of people at no cost.

Initially, the promos were submitted through The Pirate Bay’s website but when the project grew too big it was outsourced to Aussie entrepreneur Will Dayble. He will now be in charge of sifting through the thousands of submissions and picking the best ones to feature on the Pirate Bay site.

However, if something doesn’t change, those submissions won’t include those from the many thousands of UK artists who might want to benefit from this unique opportunity.

It turns out that the Promo Bay website is being blocked be several Internet providers, showing a similar message people get when they try to access the Pirate Bay site. TorrentFreak was able to confirm the blocks for BT, Virgin Media and BE, but it’s possible that more providers are also blocking the Promo Bay.

The most plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that’s used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade.

In April, the UK High Court ruled that several of the country’s leading ISPs must censor The Pirate Bay since the site and its users breach copyright on a grand scale. Soon after, Virgin Media, BT, Everything Everywhere, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, BE and O2 all blocked access to the world’s largest BitTorrent site. Several of the site’s IP-addresses and domain names were rendered inaccessible.

Promo Bay’s Will Dayble believes his site has ended up on some of the ISPs’ blocklists “by accident”.

“These providers are pretty monolithic and old school, I’d imagine it’s just a broad-scale block against a bunch of Pirate Bay properties and we fell under the net. I doubt it’s a pointed move against the Promo Bay in particular,” Dayble tells TorrentFreak.

If that’s the case then the ISPs in question may reconsider their blockade as the Promo Bay is helping, not hurting content creators. Also, the website is hosted on separate servers that have never been controlled by the Pirate Bay crew.

Whatever the reason, Dayble hopes that BT, Virgin, BE and others will correct their mistakes so that UK artists can submit their work as well. “Here’s hoping some clever tech in their ranks does something about it,” Dayble says.

Time will tell whether the ISPs in question will pick up the hint. Otherwise the Promo Bay may need a proxy of its own.

Update: The Promo Bay started a petition to get their site unblocked.

Update: As mentioned by Craig McLeod in the comments, on BT promobay.org is blocked but www.promobay.org isn’t. This is different from the other blocked domains, and suggests it was added later.

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

The real challenge is to escape obscurity and get noticed by the public. Previously, this was a task the major record labels and other media distributors fulfilled, but from this year they have a worthy opponent.

At the beginning of 2012 The Pirate Bay rolled out The Promo Bay, a new promotion platform for filmmakers, musicians, writers and all other artists alike. To help them reach an audience of tens of millions of people, The Pirate Bay started offering the artists a prime advertising spot on the site’s homepage, replacing the iconic pirate ship logo.

Best-selling author and Pirate Bay supporter Paulo Coelho had the honor of kicking off the project and in the months that followed 25 artists were featured worldwide. In addition, The Pirate Bay also ran many regional promotions.

“The featured artists got thousands of new fans on their Facebook pages and their content was downloaded or played numerous times. For example, Soso got over 100,000 views on her music video during the 72 hours it was featured,” The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak.

Even better perhaps, the promotions also resulted in hard cash for some.

McPixel designer Sos Sosowski, for example, decided to feature his game on The Pirate Bay frontpage which resulted in 3,055 purchases worth $7,824.69 in revenue. Certainly not a bad result for a weekend promotion.

Thus far the Promo Bay has been a great success, so much so that The Pirate Bay team can’t keep up with all the requests. “We have about 10,000 submissions in our inbox, with about 2000 unread,” they say.

To become more organized the BitTorrent site has called in the help of Aussie entrepreneur Will Dayble who is currently working on a separate website for the Promo Bay.

“Since the workload is way too high for us to cope with, we’ve asked our new-found friend Will in Australia for help. He and his friends built promobay.org, a site where all the artists will be able to submit their stuff in the future.”

The new site is still work in progress, but once it goes live the public will get a vote in what artists will be featured.

“We’re hoping that once we get that to work, we’ll be able to let the audience vote for a promo each week. We’ll still have the right to veto though, so there will be no Justin Bieber on our front page.”

While the Pirate Bay can’t complain about the volume of artists submissions, they would prefer to have a bit more variety. At the moment 90% of all submissions are music related, and only 5% of these are female artists or groups.

“The typical submission is an American or Swedish male indie pop group. German people on the other hand love bad dubstep,” The Pirate Bay says.

While The Pirate Bay may offer promotion services equivalent to that of a “record label,” there’s also a big difference. The BitTorrent site doesn’t ask for a cut of the proceeds and gets its satisfaction from helping to spread great content.

“We do this for fun and for the love of culture, so we’re everything the major labels are not,” they say.

Artists who are interested in becoming featured are welcome to apply, but due to the overwhelming response getting signed with a major record label might be easier.

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