Turning torrents into income for musicians is an idea that a number of companies have worked on, including BitTorrent itself with its ‘Bundles’ initiative. Now Canadian hip-hop act Ain’t No Love have become the first artist to use a donations feature in rival filesharing client FrostWire for a full EP. The band have made last year’s ‘Tears of Joy’ EP available as a torrent download, with users prompted to “send a Tip or Donation” as they download it. FrostWire promises to process PayPal payments as well as several varieties of cryptocurrency: bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin. TorrentFreak reports that the feature has been used for software and a music single, but not a full album before. “Using bitcoin has definitely widened our reach to people who don’t necessarily listen to our type of music, but like that we get down with bitcoin, and started listening to our music,” singer Saidah Conrad tells the Financial Post. FrostWire says that donations will go directly to the band.
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