The record labels and publishers want you to believe that downloading music illegally will hurt the artists and the industry as a whole, but yet there are plenty of musicians out there who are more than happy to release their music on the internet for free. Moby is one of them and with his latest album release, his 11th studio album “Innocents”, he has decided to forgo the traditional distribution channels and has instead released the album as a BitTorrent Bundle, allowing anyone to download the album for free. The bundle will consist of a few songs, and additional content can be unlocked via various methods, such as liking the artist’s page on Facebook, or by donating.
Best of all, it seems that not only does Moby not mind putting his music out there for free, but he has also provided downloaders with the music stems which essentially allows them to remix the music however they want. Speaking with the folks at Mashable, when asked about what happens if the people who remix his music decide to make money from it, Moby was quoted as saying, “They could take their friends out to dinner or give money to their favorite charity. Even if I make the stems, if they made the effort to make the remix, they should be the ones to profit from it.”
This is particularly important because when it comes to intellectual property, some labels are pretty territorial where they might dispute plagiarism over a couple of bars in a song, let alone letting someone remix an entire song and earning money from it. We have seen the different ways musicians have attempted to release their albums in the past, and this is one of them. Will BitTorrent Bundles start to catch on and become the new standard of music distribution? We guess only time, and support from the community, will tell. More information on BitTorrent Bundles can be found in the video below.
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