New Music Model Experiment: BitTorrent

Cayocosta

I placed a couple of tracks on 3 different sites to get a handle on how these services work and how well they might help artists promote themselves and/or sell their music.

The Music:

The tracks used for the test were produced, engineered, recorded and written by professionals. Now, I'm not saying that the tracks are anything special; however, they are most certainly competitive with the bulk of offerings I have found available from these services.

Self-Promotion:

There is literally zero artist self-promotion. The tracks are to live or die based solely on the service itself. There are no artist websites, and the acts and songs are - for all practical purposes - unknown.

BitTorrent:

(Free service, songs placed are generally free of charge.)

After uploading one track (and once it cleared the review process) my song appeared at the top of the "just added" list for a couple of days, during which it was downloaded around 3 times.

Later I uploaded a second track that stayed at the top of the same list for about a week, during which it was downloaded about 20 times.

To date (1 month) each song has been downloaded about 50 times.

There have been no comments or reviews.

As my tracks continue to slide down the "just added" list (displaced by new entries) it follows that the reduction in visibility will lead to fewer downloads and ultimately, stagnation.

Overall, it appears that the great majority of BitTorrent users (150+ million) rarely check the site for new music.

(It should be mentioned that BitTorrent features no preview capability, so there is no way for a user to discern the quality of a track before downloading. In other words, a bad song has just as much chance as a good one to be downloaded.)

Summary:

BitTorrent really doesn't afford much to the independent artist other than a storage/download platform with a little initial visibility to a small audience that happens to check the site. Therefore, without achieving placement among the longer-lived new-music lists, tracks are essentially doomed to fade from visibility over time with little action.

Moreover, depending on the timing of an upload, the visible life on the "just added" list could be anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days. There is also a possibility that at any time someone else might add 3 or 4 pages of new material, consequently burying all that preceded it.

Due to the lack of interest in new music at the site level, BitTorrent offers little potential for viral propagation for the volume of downloads prior to virtual invisibility is small. As such, BitTorrent, in my experience, is of little value to relatively unknown artists seeking exposure; and of zero value with regard to selling music.

Next up: GarageBand and Amie St.