10 Music Week 10.08.12 THE BIG INTERVIEW BITTORRENT
www.musicweek.com
‘WE’RE NOT THE PIRATE BAY’
BitTorrent tells Music Week how it’s trying to help the music industry monetise file-sharing The founder of the BitTorrent company, and the
DIGITAL BY TOM PAKINKIS
There are fewer topics today that get music execs more riled up than internet piracy and the infamous ‘BitTorrent’ name is one constantly coupled with the likes of The Pirate Bay, Napster and LimeWire. So why, in recent months, have we seen artists
such as Counting Crows and DJ Shadow forge public partnerships with the file-sharing brand - as ATC’s Brian Message go as far as to call BitTorrent an industry “ally”? BitTorrent’s executive director of marketing
Matt Mason talks to Music Week to shed some light, set records straight and send a simple message: “We’re here to help.”
What exactly is BitTorrent? BitTorrent, first and foremost, is a protocol. That protocol is a way to share large files over crappy a-symmetric networks like the internet, which is not good at moving large files around in one piece. What BitTorrent does is break a file up
into lots of different pieces and then shares that with lots of different people - who can then access the file by pulling pieces of it from lots of different places.
ABOVE Fair share | DJ Shadow will be the first artist to couple content with a revenue generating software offer in a ‘BitTorrent Bundle’. Meanwhile the company’s new API ‘Torque’ lets developers build bespoke distribution platforms
inventor of the protocol, is a man called Bram Cohen. He invented the protocol in 2001 and founded BitTorrent Inc. in 2004. Today, we’re the stewards of the protocol, we maintain it and we innovate on top of it. Then you’ve got BitTorrent the verb, which is
the thing that’s best known in the music and entertainment industry. It’s a verb that’s become synonymous with file-sharing and very controversial. We’re one of the most vilified brands on the internet but there’s a real motivation here to build business models and new tools for content creators [which utilise] this technology and work for everybody trying to move content around the internet.We’ve got 150 million users and that number is growing every day. If you look at who our users are, they’re people who are really passionate about music and about content. By most of the studies done, they’re way more likely to actually go out and spend money on stuff they care about. We’re doing experiments, like the one
with DJ Shadow, to work out how we can help, what our users respond to and what makes sense. At the same time we’re putting out different platforms for people to build on top of. We released something called BitTorrent
“When Edison created the record player, live musicians branded him a pirate” MATT MASON, BITTORRENT
Torque, which is a brand new API that lets developers build on top of the BitTorrent protocol inside the web - which has lead to experimentation and new content platforms that are just powered by the BitTorrent protocol.
We saw Counting Crows team up with BitTorrent in May. Why are these partnerships with the music industry coming around now? We’ve been doing them for about two years but as pretty low-key experiments with independent artists. I joined BitTorrent in December last year and took over both marketing and what we were doing with content. My philosophy was that we were trying too much
with artists who are not really moving the needle. I want us to create technology that works for artists large and small but I think to really get people to understand the value, we need to work with artists that are perceived as having something to lose. Coming from a music background, I started
calling people that I knew in the business and talking to them about what we were doing. I had been friendly with the manager of Counting Crows, Aaron Ray, for a number of years. It was a project that just made sense at the time. Counting Crows were trying to promote their new record and we were able
to give them a massive boost in terms of getting the word out there. We get people calling us every day, including
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