The entertainment industry usually consider BitTorrent as something synonymous to piracy. However, what the content industry gurus miss out is the greater picture. That is, the entertainment industry failed to recognize BitTorrent’s potential as an effective tool for content distribution. The proof? Here it is – in the first half of 2012, BitTorrent generated 124 million legal downloads.
BitTorrent commands an audience of millions of users. And artists are increasingly beginning to discern the potential of such a vast audience. A number of up and coming artists are signing licensing deals with BitTorrent to distribute their content through the platform.
This is what manifested the stats, calculated by data and analytics company Musicmetric. According to the company’s Digital Music Index, a total of 405 million downloads were tracked to have handled by BitTorrent, during the first half of 2012. Of these, at least 124 downloads were those of legal and licensed content. And this refers only to the downloads related to music.
According to MusicMetric, “[Legal content] has become hugely popular in place of other illegal content in a quarter of the top 20 countries for downloads.”
BitTorrent also endorses the findings, showing through an infographic how the number of legal music downloads has risen tremendously over the last few months.
BitTorrent’s Matt Mason recently stated, “What this statistic shows very clearly is there’s a lot of good, legitimate content in the BitTorrent ecosystem that is adding value to the careers of the artists and publishers who decided to release their work using the protocol.”
The best part of licensing a deal with BitTorrent is that an artist doesn’t have to pay hefty fees to the regular content distributors. Moreover, the content is immediately advertised to millions of BitTorrent users, which means immediate and wide-scale publicity. One hopes that more and more artists sign up licensing deals with BitTorrent, bringing it at par with the all-mighty content distribution industry.
Courtesy: Torrent Freak
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