Earlier this year the popular dance musician Moby (real name Richard Hall) released a collection of his music for free via bit torrent. The same collection now has the distinct honor of being the most torrented music file of 2013 with nearly nine million downloads.
I did a blog post on how Moby thought that the music industry was too short sighted in its fight against piracy. Moby believes that in the long term, having people share music on the Internet is beneficial to the artists. Through downloads of his new album Moby was able to add over 400,000 people onto his mailing list and 130,000 people clicked through the links provided on the torrent bundle to iTunes.
It’s still somewhat up in the air whether Moby’s method of distributing his music for free is a viable option for generating revenue. In the long term I can see it benefiting Moby the way he wants it to, but I still have to wonder whether he could have still had that long-term benefit if he released the album in the traditional way. This (once again) is a pretty wait and see scenario; as far as I can tell, it will probably be one of the first case studies which will show how effective free distribution of music can be for artists in the long term.
Source:
http://torrentfreak.com/and-the-most-downloaded-torrent-of-2013-is-completely-legal-140116/
