In the aftermath of Radiohead’s In Rainbows album first week downloads one very interesting phenomenon was noticed – even though the album was free to download through inrainbows.com, around 240,000 people downloaded it through BitTorrent trackers on the day it was released. This implies that it doesn’t matter anymore if the music is free or not – the new generation of music consumers are grown into free online content sharing culture and will continue to use the same content sharing networks that they have gotten accustomed to. Major record companies have failed to take advantage of this phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean that independent artists couldn’t take advantage of it.

More and more music consumers, who want to get music on their mp3-players, head to BitTorrent websites or use peer-to-peer software. In many countries it is illegal to download copyrighted content from these services, but apparently that factor is not stopping their growth and the increasing user amount. I’ve said many times that recorded music should be used primarily as a promotional tool and the next idea requires exactly that kind of methodology.

Create BitTorrent files of your songs and albums, and share them on your own website and on the largest BitTorrent websites such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova, TorrentReactor, btjunkie etc. When you release new music make sure you also make it available on peer-to-peer networks and BitTorrent trackers. That’s where many people will first search it from, when they first hear about your music from their friends or radio, read a review of your newest single/album or see your music videos on YouTube. There are not so many ways to promote your music inside BitTorrent websites and peer-to-peer networks, because people usually know exactly what they are searching for from those services. However, they still offer an alternative and easy way for people, who are accustomed to using those services, to get your music.

If you want to try to promote your music with the help of BitTorrent technology you could always try a Firefox plug-in called AllPeers, which integrates social networking and torrent file sharing. The service seems like a very potential way for artists to share and promote their music, because you can add friends and send them your own torrent files. AllPeers allows you to make also private torrent files, which means that you can choose the people you share your files with instead of sharing everything with everybody. However, the service’s amount of users has to go a bit more up before it can offer any real promotional value for artists.