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10.08.12 Music Week 11
the major labels, offering to pay us to do these things. It tells us that we’re going in the right direction but that’s not our business model. What we’re trying to do now is a series of experiments in a very transparent way and try and prove the value available here.
“We get calls every day, including from the major labels, offering to pay us to get the word out about new records” MATT MASON, BITTORRENT
What form will these initiatives take and where will they be seen? With something like the DJ Shadow project, we create a bundle that you can put all types of media inside of. Then we include a software offer that’s not intrusive and that adds value to the content that DJ Shadow created. The idea is that the more people who share this
thing, the more the probability increases that someone will want to install the software that comes with the bundle. The more people that then install the free software, the more users we can deliver to software companies who in turn pay us for that - and we’re going to share that money with DJ Shadow. We’ve got our own platforms in BitTorrent
and uTorrent but the way BitTorrenting works means that things are shared way beyond our ecosystem. There are lots of companies that build versions of BitTorrent software. So you’ll find these bundles tend to get shared far wider than just on our platform. That’s the big problem for the content
industries: the way people share stuff online is about relentless copying and that doesn’t make sense with the way that we do content distribution, or at least the way we did it before the internet. That’s a really bad thing for the content industries because nobody knows how to monetise an infinitely reproducible file.
“We’re one of the most vilified brands on the internet. But there’s a motivation here to build business models and new tools that help content creators” MATT MASON, BITTORRENT
You said that BitTorrent has been vilified, how successful do you think you’ve been in changing that view? In the short time that I’ve been here I feel like we’ve really started to turn things around. The music industry and the film industry are businesses built on people, trust and relationships. I think there’s just been a culture clash between
Hollywood, the record business and Silicon Valley – they’re all tribes that speak different languages and don’t understand each other and it’s not lead to anything good. People in the Valley are all business, they don’t
want to do two-hour lunches, they want to see real value, they want to see numbers and then they’re out. No-one in Hollywood operates like that, no- one in the music business operates like that. It’s just been a case of talking to people in their language and saying, “This is who we are, we’re not
a bunch of Swedish teenagers in a basement somewhere trying to steal everything, we’re a company of 100 people in San Francisco that’s really passionate about content.”
BitTorrent pioneered the technology at the core of websites like The Pirate Bay, which the music industry is trying to fight against. What kind of problems does that cause? It’s definitely a problem, but we don’t make file- sharing websites. When Bram Cohen created the technology, he was not thinking about content at all, he was thinking about data. He’s an engineer, that’s all he thinks about. When Edison created the record player, live
musicians branded him a pirate for creating a machine that made perfect copies of live performances, which is what musicians did to get paid. It took Edison working with the artists to create Edison records, the first record label where royalties were paid to artists, before everyone saw that there was something good there and that was the music industry that we know today. We feel our job now is to do these projects the way Edison did back in the day.
Why has it taken so long to monetise this channel? Again, it just comes back to people speaking different languages. Silicon Valley’s approach has always been to build something and then throw stuff in front of people and see what happens. It’s a very different process to the music business or
the film industry where they say, “Let’s spend years crafting a really amazing piece of content then put it in front of people and leverage it through licensing and selling tickets and copies everywhere we possibly can.” There’s been a short term grab for profits on all
sides and no-one’s really thought, “How do we just do something vey measured and long term where we don’t have to think about selling something really quickly or getting a giant user base quickly?” BitTorrent spent millions and millions trying to
do these licensing deals with the entertainment industries some years ago and it didn’t work out: it didn’t work for BitTorrent, it didn’t work for MySpace and it’s not working out for a lot of the platforms now when deals haven’t been executed particularly well. The real opportunity here is to be a strong
conduit between creators and fans. If we can give people good APIs, they can build the things that work. There’s no reason why Sony or Universal or Warner can’t build a really great content delivery system on top of BitTorrent Torque and help their artists directly access their fans. We’d love to help those guys do that.
Is BitTorrent responsible for the tools The Pirate Bay uses and could it help to combat those sites? We’re not the provider of the tools that those websites use in any way shape or form above the actual base level protocol itself. A protocol is not really something you can stop,
it’s just a way of doing things. We could shut down BitTorrent tomorrow, fire everybody here and the BitTorrent protocol would still exist. It’s an idea more than anything else. What we have is the largest amount of users that use this protocol to find content. We don’t serve
ABOVE BitTorrent’s director of marketing Matt Mason
RIGHT Count ‘em | Counting Crows partnered with BitTorrent in May hoping to tap into the platform’s 150 million users
content other than that from people who work with us and give us their content legitimately. We don’t point to illegal content, we don’t host anything illegal. There’s nothing that we can do about what The Pirate Bay chooses to do other than give people different options. One thing that the last 10 years has taught us is
that it’s really futile to try and fight this problem by pretending you can shut it down. The internet was designed to withstand nuclear attacks, it’s the most resilient communication tool we’ve ever created. What does work is giving people great
legitimate options that give them content in ways that make sense for both them and artists. That’s the only thing that we should be focused
on. I think the biggest tragedy of the last 10 years has been that we haven’t come together as industries. That’s what we’re trying to do now.
BIT PARTNERS Counting Crows teamed up with BitTorrent
in May to release a promotional bundle of songs from their latest studio album for free. The band’s frontman Adam Duritz said, "I've been a big proponent of giving songs away for a long time, I can dwell on the negatives, but I don't want to miss out on the fact that there's 150 million people who I can give songs to.” BitTorrent and DJ Shadow (pictured) announced a partnership in July that
will see a ‘BitTorrent Bundle’ package exclusive DJ Shadow content alongside tracks from his latest album Hidden Transmissions From The MPC Era (1992- 1996). It will be the first BitTorrent Bundle to feature a free software offer from BitTorrent advertising partners alongside the content. Every time a user accepts the software offer, DJ Shadow will get a share of any revenue earned by the advertiser. “We believe we can make digital distribution even more viable for creators
and fans,” said BitTorrent chief executive Eric Klinker. “Beginning now, we’ll be testing new ways to drive profitability for creators while delivering even more meaningful media experiences for our users.”
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