Download music like you were a criminal, but do it all legally. Something in the neighborhood of 1000 songs, completely free for download. That is the upside of the epic BitTorrent meets SXSW music festival. Scared? Excited? Intrigued? Of course you are…
A little background:
BitTorrent is a peer2peer application with a twist. To quote the [BitTorrent site]:
You have something terrific to publish — a large music or video file, software, a game or anything else that many people would like to have. But the more popular your file becomes, the more you are punished by soaring bandwidth costs. If your file becomes phenomenally successful and a flash crowd of hundreds or thousands try to get it at once, your server simply crashes and no one gets it.
There is a solution to this vicious cycle. BitTorrent, the result of over two years of intensive development, is a simple and free software product that addresses all of these problems.
The key to scaleable and robust distribution is cooperation. With BitTorrent, those who get your file tap into their upload capacity to give the file to others at the same time. Those that provide the most to others get the best treatment in return. (“Give and ye shall receive!”)
To summarize, as the downloader starts downloading the file, he also starts uploading the part already received to other users, taking the strain off the original source and speeding up dowloads for everybody. Those who are giving the most back to others get priority for getting the file, making it a very nice cooperative system.
In short, if there is a large file to download from the internet, BitTorrent is probably the best thing going right now. The original BitTorrent client is available at [bittorrent.com]. If that particular client doesn’t suit one’s taste, there are plenty of other clients available- the Java-based [Azureus] client is currently very popular.
SXSW is the the South by Southwest Music Festival held in Austin. A huge music event attended by hundreds of bands (1331 showcasing acts in 2005, according to the [SXSW website]. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1400 bands are [scheduled] for this year- this is a heavyweight major music scene that has also incorporated film. Pricey event to attend- a music pass for the entire 5 day event was as cheap as $375 for purchases 6 months in advance to $575 for last minute purchases.
SXSW has teamed up with BitTorrent to offer two torrents worth almost 1000 songs from SXSW artists. Over 3GB of music. It is boggling, really. Get the .torrents [here] (and, for those not already in the know, a .torrent is a tiny file that contains the information needed to get the download started.