Rockers Flex BitTorrent's Muscle

(Wired)

With MTV and VH1 now crowded with programs like Date My Mom, The Ashlee Simpson Show and Celebrity Fit Club, there's little room for music videos, especially from independent artists.

That's why one up-and-coming group, the Decemberists, opted to release its new music video, Sixteen Military Wives, for free using BitTorrent. The high-quality video file has logged more than 1,700 downloads since it was released over the weekend.

"For the most part, MTV and VH1 won't touch video unless bands have sold a huge number of records," said Dawn Barger, manager of the Decemberists. "It's impossible to get rotation."

BitTorrent provided a way for the band to efficiently get the video out without paying a lot of money for bandwidth. The group also hopes to gain exposure from fans passing along the video to others.

"No matter where you stand on issues of copyright, a network like BitTorrent is really for exactly this kind of thing -- when you have content that you want to freely distribute," said Slim Moon, founder of Kill Rock Stars, the Decemberists' record label. "It seems like ... the most logical way to distribute."

Aaron Stewart, the director of the video, said the idea to use BitTorrent came from a friend. He said the fans on the Decemberists' message board helped get the video out by acting as seeders -- people who share their download of the video file with others to speed up download time and share bandwidth. Two fans agreed to host the tracker, which provides the link to the torrent file, on their server.

Listening to: Johnny A.