DJ Shadow Teams Up With BitTorrent To Distribute Music
25 July 2012
On August 15, DJ Shadow is set to release Total Breakdown: Hidden Transmissions From The MPC Era, 1992-1996, a collection of vintage tracks/snippets from his back-catalogue.
For the distribution of the record he has partnered with BitTorrent to release a three track sampler as a ‘BitTorrent Bundle’. It's worth noting that Shadow’s not the first to release a ‘Bundle’. Counting Crows have famously previously tried pushing tracks this way. How this is different is that the package will come complete with free software from one of BitTorrent’s advertising partners.
The partner and software will vary by territory, but in most parts of the world it will be a media player application. People can choose not to download that software, but if they do, the partner pays BitTorrent, and DJ Shadow gets a commission. The deal is a partnership between BitTorrent, DJ Shadow and his digital marketing team Fame House. It’s the latest example of BitTorrent working directly with musicians (as well as filmmakers, authors and games developers) to put its filesharing website to legal use.
BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker said that the service was experimenting with ways to “monetise the entire torrent ecosystem”, offering “a potentially sustainable way for all artists to monetise BitTorrent”.
The Total Breakdown bundle can be downloaded as a torrent here. The album, in physical and digital formats, is due for release on 15 August.