Pretty Lights, the electronic dance artist known to his family as Derek Vincent Smith, has partnered with BitTorrent to distribute a specially created bundle of his music to the platform’s millions of users. As with his previous releases, this year-end package is free of charge.
Included in the package are a video of Pretty Lights performing live at the 2011 Bonaroo festival (viewable below) and a new single I Know the Truth, along with three extended play releases from 2010: Glowing In The Darkest Night (eight tracks), Making Up A Changing Mind (six tracks), and Spilling Over Every Side (six tracks).
“I’ve experienced the benefits firsthand of letting anyone and everyone download my music at no charge, which is, primarily, a momentous growth in the attendance of my live shows,” Smith said. “I believe that the recipe for my success has been three-fold: one, producing fresh and original soulful music; two, continuing to always invest back in the production of my live show/experience; and three, pushing the envelope in the way that I distribute my music online to new listeners. The third is why I’m so excited to be partnering with BitTorrent.”
Earlier this year, Pretty Lights was included in Pollstar’s chart of the top 50 grossing concert tours. He currently is on tour in Australia, where among other venues he will be performing at the Stereosonic touring festival in Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane. He also is scheduled to play two sold-out shows at the 6,500-capacity 1st Bank Center in Colorado to celebrate the dawning of 2012 on Dec. 30 and 31.
“These live experiences are at the core of Pretty Light’s success,” said Shahi Ghanem, chief strategist at BitTorrent. “As the Pretty Lights phenomenon continues to win over the world, we are very happy to offer a platform to directly distribute his music.”
Related links:
# apps.bittorrent.com/torrents/PrettyLights-Bittorrent.torrent
http://blog.bittorrent.com/2011/12/01/deck-the-halls-with-pretty-lights-music
This is incorrectly reported. There is no “pay what you want” feature. The music download is FREE!
Doesn’t “pay what you want” include not paying anything? But to be serious, I was just trying to include that he accepts donations. I’ll add something to the story to make that more clear.
And distributing music for free via bittorrent isn’t new, See Jamendo, where they’ve over 100,000 albums with bittorrent links, all free, and all CC-licensed as well.
You’re correct, bands have been giving away their music since there has been music. The earliest instance we know of a band using BitTorrent for this purpose was in 2003, but there may have been examples from before that.
We thought it was worth writing about because Pretty Lights is an interesting artist who has an original approach to using samples, and his philosophy toward music makes it particularly relevant that he doesn’t charge for it. Also, believe it or not, there are a lot of people out there who don’t realize there are legal uses for BitTorrent … and some of them are in Congress.
Anyone interested in finding additional legal torrents can look here as a starting place – http://www.clearbits.net.
Also, Jamendo isn’t p2p, but it’s worth checking out for anyone looking into new business models for musicians.