In this edition of FDL: magical/simple/pretty folk-pop, in the form of three live show torrents from The Weepies. The band name sounds supersad, but we promise it’s happy. How could it not be? IT’S FRIDAY.
Friday Download: The Weepies
1. El Rey / Los Angeles, California / 2012
2. Butternut Ridge / Oberlin, Ohio / 2004
3. Dizzy’s / San Diego, California / 2004
You can read on the setlist(s) if that’s your thing. Continue reading →
Last month, Youtube hero and DIY artist Alex Day kicked off a collaboration project with BitTorrent fans. He posted stems from his Epigrams and Interludes tracks to SoShare. You guys picked them up, and made them yours. Awesome. This playlist has pretty much become our favorite thing on the Internet. (We’re probably not alone – these videos have been watched over 31 thousand times.)
The winning track, as decided by Alex: Tess Beighton’s remix of Forever Yours. It adds edge and originality; it comes from the same feeling and place as the original. It’s pretty epic, and we’re reminded again how amazing songs can sound in the hands of fans. On behalf of BitTorrent: congrats! You can find more from Tess here.
In this week’s Friday Download: a decade’s worth of live shows and bittersweet melodies from Death Cab for Cutie, preserved by the dedicated curatorial team over at archive.org. Set list after the jump.
Friday Download: Death Cab For Cutie
1. Emo’s / Austin, Texas / 2001
2. Kamp / Bielefeld, Germany / 2006
3. 80-35 Festival / Des Moines, Iowa / 2012
Ultra is a label that has changed the landscape and creative culture of music. Today, we’re working with them to do it again.
Over the years, Ultra has been the home of, and catalyst for, artists like Kaskade, David Guetta, Tiesto, deadmau5, and Calvin Harris, among others. In 2013, starting now, they’ll be the first label release content direct-to-fan using an Alpha media format we’re calling the BitTorrent Bundle . Here’s the deal.
We used to buy music at independent record shops downtown. We bemoaned their disappearance, but still shopped the chain mega-stores that took their place. When these moved online, in the form of iTunes or Amazon, we were there, wallets out. For fifty years or more, the path to purchase has essentially been the same. Go to the physical/digital record store, buy an album.
But what if the record store was inside the album instead?
What if every single piece of content could function as a flyer, and a standalone storefront?
What if you could code a checkout counter into each media file published by an artist?
You’d be able to reach the people who slip through the cracks of traditional retail outlets – the other 40% of the Internet. You’d be able to build content that appreciates in value over time; that grows more powerful, each time it’s shared. That’s the idea behind the BitTorrent Bundle. Continue reading →
Like many of you, we’ve been following Netflix with great interest. We are subscribers. We are fans. We believe in the work that they are doing. And we support their effort to innovate and evolve digital distribution, in ways that are sustainable for creators, other rights-holders and fans. That said, we were surprised by some of the comments made by Ted Sarandos recently during an interview with Stuff.tv.
We strongly agree with his perspective that making more good content more accessible will curb piracy. However, we want to take a moment to correct two of his comments. The first issue is the application of BitTorrent as a synonym for Internet piracy. The second is the assertion that BitTorrent traffic drops as Netflix is introduced to new markets. Neither statement is true. Continue reading →
On April 23, we opened up a little Alpha project called BitTorrent Sync. The response from users has been: awesome. Together, they’ve been helping build a better way to sync.
BitTorrent Sync was designed to solve for what we see as real, fundamental challenges to data synchronization: limitations on speed, size, and space; limitations on file security and dependency on cloud infrastructure. Because BitTorrent Sync is based on distributed technology, you can sync as many big files as you want. Transfers are encrypted, and information isn’t stored on any server, or in the cloud. Your content belongs to you, and stays on devices of your choice. That’s the way syncing should work.
Turns out, it’s working for you guys, too. To date, more than a petabyte of anonymous data has been synced between BitTorrent Sync users. A petabyte! To put that into context, the Internet Archive, one of the world wide web’s largest repositories of media, houses 10 petabytes of data. Sync is massive. And it’s growing. Over 70 terabytes of anonymous data are synced daily.
But Sync isn’t just working in ways we imagined. It’s working in creative ways that we never could have predicted. A hacker team at TechCrunch Disrupt built a private distributed blog platform off Sync. Users are sending us on scavenger hunts. We’re inspired. And we’re excited about what’s next for Sync.
If you haven’t yet tried BitTorrent Sync, you can grab the open Alpha here. Happy Syncing, people.
Update
Sync was built for secure sharing. While we have general statistics about the app, we don’t have any access to private information.
The client reports back anonymous usage statistics in the same way our other clients do. Sync uses this call to check if there’s a new build available. This call also contains some anonymous statistics that allow us to understand how Sync performs, and how it’s being used; data transferred directly, through relay, size of folders, and number of files synced.
This is the only information we collect, and we left it open intentionally – so that people could see the data we’re collecting. That way, it can be easily verified that we don’t have access to any private information. Read more here.
In this week’s FDL: three live shows from the Arizona punk luminaries. This is the evolution of a great American band, recorded and perserved by the intrepid curatorial team over at archive.org. Happy Friday, people.
Friday Download: Meat Puppets
1. UCSB / Santa Barbara, CA / 1988
2. Velvet Slego / Rimini, Italy / 1992
3. Mercury Lounge / New York, NY / 2013
In March, we got the chance to catch up with some creators, change-makers, and heroes of the free world at SXSW. Our intrepid film crew (Jeph, Danimal) captured the conversations so we could share them with you. Herewith: a series of small talks about big things.
In this week’s edition: words with Just Blaze, the super-producer behind everything from The Blueprint to the Harlem Shake. He played six shows in three days at SXSW. He played ours without a sound system; a stolen moment of real hip hop.
Fresh off that set with Young Guru, Just Blaze talks to us about the brave new world of music production; his experience with Higher, the role of direct-to-fan, and how BitTorrent is picking up where the record industry failed. After the jump: photos from his set at SXSW. Continue reading →
One of the really interesting uses for BitTorrent is archiving content. If a few people think a thing is important enough to keep seeding it, it will always be available to anyone who wants it. The people who are seeding can come and go. As long as there’s one person who’s holding a copy, it will be both preserved and made available. Thanks to nonprofits like ibiblio and the Internet Archive, we have the beginnings of serious perma-seeding infrastructure.
Webhosts come and webhosts go, but BitTorrent can be forever. A great example of that is the Archive Team’s torrent of all of Geocities (650GB compressed!). When Yahoo announced they were shutting down Geocities, Archive Team kicked into gear and saved the site for posterity. Geocities is a photo album of the web’s growth, starting when it was a toddler just learning to walk and going through to its awkward early teenage years. It’s a crucial part of the heritage of early “Digital Natives” (myself included), and an invaluable resource for people studying the way people and cultures acclimatized to the new model of the world we all live in.
It’s also a great resource for art. A favorite project of mine was “The Deleted City,” which took viewers on a little tour of the Geocities archive on a video monitor. The artist behind it has released a follow-up piece, making it an interactive tour.
“The Deleted City” is an artifact of the enabling power of BitTorrent as a decentralized storage/dissemination tool. It’s also really neat, and rather nostalgic for those of us who remember those very MIDIs. (This is from a world before MP3s were ubiquitous, if you can imagine that.)
In this edition of FDL: Tegan and Sara. Three live shows from the road, circa 2013. Instant heartbreak and happy, kept in common by the dedicated preservationists over at archive.org. Have an epic weekend, all.
Friday Download: Tegan and Sara
1. The LC / Columbus, Ohio / 2013
2. Dinwoodie Lounge / Edmonton, Alberta / 2002
3. The Catalyst / Santa Cruz, California / 2013
