When Converge Studios and Rock Mafia wanted to get the word out in August about an original TV series, they turned to an unconventional partner: BitTorrent, a file-transfer protocol that distributes large amounts of digital data and is often used in peer-to-peer file sharing.
Within the first week, more than 1 million people downloaded the 500 MB file, with 50,000 people opting to receive emails about “Fly or Die,” a fictional show based on the real-life experiences of Rock Mafia founders Tim James and Antonina Armato, a Santa Monica, Calif., songwriting duo that has penned or produced dozens of hits for Ellie Goulding, No Doubt, Mariah Carey, Green Day and others.
We got such a great reaction that we’re thinking, ‘This is really worth rolling up our sleeves and giving it a real go,'” Armato says. “We’ve had lots of big TV producers contact us and say they’re interested in taking the show to the next level. We never would have known this if we hadn’t done the pilot this way.”
The producers of “Fly or Die” weren’t the only ones to have teamed with the San Francisco-based BitTorrent on a release. During the past 12 months, Public Enemy, the Pixies, Linkin Park, Pretty Lights and Kaskade have been among those that have quietly distributed content through the service. And it’s not just music groups-filmmakers, TV producers, graphic novelists, university professors and even book publishers have ventured into BitTorrent’s community of 170 million active monthly users to find their audience.
“There’s a fear in the music business about file-sharing technology,” says Gary “G-Wiz” Rinaldo, Public Enemy’s producer/manager. “We don’t have that fear.”
The entertainment world’s fear and loathing of BitTorrent has, lately, started to give way to a more pragmatic attitude — something along the lines of, “If you can’t beat them, at least learn how to leverage them.” The shift from pariah to potential partner comes as the result of BitTorrent’s efforts to reach out to media companies and deliver tangible data results — email addresses, awareness, traffic and, eventually, sales.
Central to this approach is the BitTorrent Bundle-a new file format that lets content creators put up free content to 
encourage downloads as well as layers of additional content behind a “gate” that downloaders can unlock by completing an action, such as submitting their email addresses, sharing the content, taking a survey or entering a contest.
“There’s no other option available where you can take a couple of months of an artist’s work and put it out in a creative way,” says Austin Briggs, digital marketing and brand strategist for hip-hop act Jet Life, which released a mixtape in August as a BitTorrent Bundle. “It’s activated local promoters, and there’s been a heavy lift from Twitter and Facebook that’s still resonating. We saw a 30% jump in presales from the time we dropped the bundle, and a 500% growth across the apparel site, both in sign-ups and merchandise sales.”
The bundle’s format has been evolving during the last year as more artists deploy it for their campaigns. For its next iteration, BitTorrent is planning to add a payment mechanism so artists can sell digital content or accept donations, VP of marketing Matt Mason says. To encourage sharing, the company wants to experiment with thresholds — once a certain number of downloads or sales is reached on a bundle, a gate could open to give everyone access to extra content or, say, a discount for merch or tickets.
“In the old days, you had to distribute content through stores,” Mason says. “With the bundle, we can put the store inside the content. Every time it’s shared, artists have another opportunity to put their store in front of someone new.”
There’s a queue that extends into next spring to create a custom bundle with BitTorrent, which currently doesn’t charge content creators while the product is being developed.
Artists also get to keep all the data they gather from the bundles, whether it’s email addresses, survey data or any other information that creators want to request from users in return for access to additional content.
As a distribution platform, BitTorrent has different strengths when compared with, say, YouTube, Spotify or iTunes. Creators get to own the customer data and keep all their revenue, at least for now. But they also don’t have plug-and-play access to advertising revenue that’s available to YouTube or Vevo’s content partners. Nor do they receive streaming royalties each time their songs are played, as with Spotify or Pandora. And though BitTorrent’s audience has proved its willingness to consume content for free, it’s unclear just how many can be converted to paying customers, particularly at the level of iTunes users.
For some labels, the promise of additional data is enough.
“We wanted to find out who they are, what they’re doing, what they’re looking for and whether we could turn them into fans,” says Dan Ghosh-Roy, head of digital strategy, development and operations at Ultra Music, an independent electronic dance music label in New York that distributed a Kaskade video in May promoting the DJ’s documentary release.
Within a month, the campaign drove 3.5 million people to download the promotional video through BitTorrent, 15% of whom went on to check out Kaskade’s website. Ultra also gathered 175,000 new email addresses — all from people who “double-opted in,” meaning they took the extra step of adding Ultra to the “safe senders” list to ensure the label’s emails don’t get filtered out.
“We’re tip-toeing into unchartered terrain,” Ghosh-Roy says. “Whatever we learn will be a win.”
