Music Ally

Last night saw YouTube’s live stream of a U2 concert in California, watchable by viewers in 16 countries.

A Twitter widget was built in allowing people to chat about the gig, complete with a dedicated #U2webcast – it’s still one of the top trending topics on Twitter this morning.

The webcast is still accessible on U2’s YouTube channel. However, it wasn’t the only livestreaming show this weekend…

Researchers the Far North Living Lab webcast a performance from the Insomnia festival in Norway, using BitTorrent. It was tied in with the EU-funded P2P-Next project.

“If the scalability is good for live streaming, this can increase the amount of viewers without massive bandwidth bills,” says researcher Njal Borch.

YouTube and BitTorrent – very different beasts, but both looking at better ways to power concert webcasts. It’s a far cry from the early days of grainy, postage-stamp sized webcasts.

The Pirate Bay may be going legit, but the march of technological innovation around BitTorrent continues elsewhere. Take Myka, a new set-top box which lets people sit on their sofas and download torrent files to be played through their TV.

It includes a weekly scheduler so users can ensure they don’t trigger throttling or bandwidth caps from their ISPs. iPods and other media devices can be plugged into it, and it also lets users browse YouTube and other websites. Yours for $299 with a one-terabyte internal hard drive (or $199 for the 250GB version).

We’ll be honest: this is still an early adopter thing. But it shows how BitTorrent technology has the potential to go not just beyond the geeks, but beyond the PC. Which is a worrying prospect for rights-owners.

appDowner isn’t the first unsanctioned iPhone application store, but it’s the first one to use BitTorrent technology. It’s actually an iPhone app, too, which can be used to download other apps, or any content (e.g. music) from BitTorrent.

Which sounds like reason to worry if you’re Apple or rightsowners. However, one point made by a commenter on TorrentFreak’s story on it is sensible: who’s going to be seeding the content? It’s not as if people will have their iPhones running appDowner all day (not least because of battery life).

We should say, appDowner only works on iPhones that have been ‘jailbroken’ to run unauthorised applications – so it won’t lead to a mass outbreak of piracy from regular iPhone owners, nor does it have any likelihood of being allowed onto the official App Store.

The Pirate Bay promised to launch its IPREDator VPN some time ago, letting people use BitTorrent anonymously to avoid their details being grabbed by investigators. It’s still yet to go fully live, though.

The Register reveals that IPREDator IS now in beta testing with 3,000 users, with another 180,000 in the queue to sign up when it launches within a month.

At €5 a month, that means a potential revenue stream of €915,000 a month for The Pirate Bay, which is sure to not go down well with its foes in the entertainment industries.

The Pirate Bay may have been defeated in court – pending an appeal – but BitTorrent technology continues to evolve and mutate in ways that will worry right-holders even more.

Meet BitBlinder, a new free tool that claims to let people use BitTorrent with complete anonymity, hiding their IP addresses. Or, as one of its creators explains: “We want to make online anonymity fast, usable and ubiquitous to the point that organisations give up on spying and filtering us”.

It’s apparently not as fast as regular BitTorrent use, but it’s fast enough – and the key thing is that it’s free. Previously, using BitTorrent anonymously has involved paying to use a virtual private network (VPN). Among new features promised are the ability to avoid university and corporate firewalls, too.

We’ll just print this quote unedited – it’s from an interview with BitTorrent co-founder Bram Cohen, on the oversupply of recorded music:

“Music has a bigger problem, it’s that people want to make it. It’s the peacocks tail. The reason guys make music is that they want to get laid. So men are usually willing to pay a lot of money in the hope of getting laid. Anything that helps you get laid with amazing regularity is something you would expect a tremendous oversupply of. So we have unbelievable amounts of music. People pay a lot to learn how to play music and it’s ridiculous to expect people to make money off it. Normally if you want to make money you do something no one wants to do.”

Does he have a point?

The standard reaction to last week’s Guilty verdict in the Pirate Bay trial is to say `ah, but it won’t have a big impact on file-sharing’. We’re guilty of that ourselves. But early indications are that the ruling IS having an effect on torrent trackers in Sweden.

Several have decided to shut down in the days since the verdict was announced, including Nordicbits, Powerbits, Piratebits, MP3nerds and Wolfbits.

As Nordicbits explained in a message on its site: “We have to shut down the site now due all circumstances. We don’t have time to do anything to the code, we don’t have interest in it, we don’t have any more money and the biggest reason is The Pirate Bay info”.

TorrentFreak suggests that more than a dozen more may close in the coming days, although The Pirate Bay itself is still alive and kicking.

As we explained in a recent Music Ally Report feature, almost no big albums reach their official release date without being leaked online, nowadays. So it’s no surprise to see that Depeche Mode’s newie Sounds Of The Universe is all over the torrent sites, despite not coming out until 21 April.

However, the twist in this case is that the album is the first to get Apple’s new iTunes Pass treatment, where fans signed up for $18.99 to get the album and other exclusive tracks and content.

Digital Music News suggests fans who’ve signed up to the deal won’t be happy – we wonder if Apple couldn’t factor this into the process, and be ready to release the album early to iTunes Pass subscribers.

Forget The Pirate Bay for a second: Swedish police have just busted a Stockholm man with more than 65 terabytes of pirated music, films, TV shows and software that were being made available for download via P2P networks.

The Swedish Antipiracy Agency claims it was part of a Scandinavian “FTP ring” called Sunnydale.

“The well-organized pirates on the scene seemed to have overestimated their ability to hide their identity and location, but the bust showed that we could find the responsible entity,” says lawyer Henrik Ponten.

Figures shared with Music Ally by tracking firm BigChampagne reveal that more than 445,000 people illegally downloaded U2’s No Line On The Horizon album in the two-week period between 18th February and 3rd March from BitTorrent.

The chart supplied by the company shows the spike in downloads following the album’s leak in February, apparently due to it being accidentally made available for sale on an Australian digital music store ahead of its official release on 2nd March.

It’s not great for U2, although they’re by no means the only band to suffer from a high-profile pre-release leak in this way. Would all those 445,000 people have bought the album if they didn’t have BitTorrent clients? Nobody knows for sure.

“They’re probably losing out, but to find out how much, you’d have to get into the head of every music fan and assess whether they would have bought the album if they hadn’t gotten it for free,” says BigChampagne’s Eric Garland. “It’s a philosophical debate – there’s no resolution.”

This chart was originally published as part of a longer feature in the Music Ally Report, a fortnightly publication analysing digital music trends and strategies. For a free trial subscription, click here.