![](\"http:\/\/static2.businessinsider.com\/image\/503a21b269bedd9f13000005\/matt-mason.jpg\")
It\u2019s been a big year for BitTorrent, said Matt Mason, the company\u2019s executive director of marketing. Mason and his team have been working with big names like DJ Shadow and Tim Ferriss to figure out how to turn file sharing into a source of revenue. <\/p>\n
I met with Mason (who also wrote The Pirate\u2019s Dilemma) last week to discuss how BitTorrent can work with the music industry and the company\u2019s plans for next year. Mason joined BitTorrent almost exactly a year ago, and since then, the company has run a total of 16 artist campaigns. It hasn\u2019t found the One True Solution to monetizing music yet, and Mason said the answer won\u2019t come in the next few months, but the next quarter \u201cwill get us closer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not that he actually believes in a single answer. Instead, he said BitTorrent wants to provide \u201cthe layer of tools\u201d that artists need to monetize file sharing in whatever way makes sense for them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t want to dictate what the business model is, because we don\u2019t know what it is,\u201d Mason said. \u201cThere\u2019s not a business model for content in the digital world. There\u2019s a new business model for every piece of content you release.\u201d<\/p>\n
The emphasis is very much on artist partnerships, not deals with record labels or movie studios. Since most people associate BitTorrent with illegal file sharing, I assumed the big entertainment companies want nothing to do with it, but Mason said that\u2019s not entirely true. (He also pointed out that BitTorrent drove 124 million legal music downloads in the first six months of the year, accounting for nearly one-third of the total 405 million music downloads on BitTorrent that were tracked by Musicmetric.) The bigger problem, he said, is that the entertainment industry\u2019s terms are too onerous: \u201cThe deals just don\u2019t make sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
So BitTorrent works with artists on one-off experiments. For example, it collaborated with DJ Shadow and his digital marketing agency Fame House to create a bundle with exclusive content around his release Hidden Transmissions From The MPC Era (1992-1996), and it ran ads for free software alongside those bundles. Mason said the company wasn\u2019t happy with the download interface, so it limited the ads to a few geographies, but even so, the campaign saw 18.5 million impressions, with 4 million people agreeing to check out the free software \u2014 an impressive conversion rate of around 21.5 percent.<\/p>\n
Mason described another partnership where BitTorrent worked with the filmmakers behind the movie Kumar\u00e9 to create a bundle of promotional content (including the first 10 minutes of the film), spurring a fan campaign that helped expand the release from a single theater to 15 cities.<\/p>\n
Listening to Mason\u2019s examples, I noted that they covered a lot of ground, but never involved charging the consumer directly \u2014 instead, BitTorrent drove purchases elsewhere (for example by promoting movie ticket sales or iTunes downloads) or monetized through advertising. He responded, \u201cThat\u2019s what we\u2019ve been able to do so far, but maybe we\u2019re just not very good at this.\u201d As BitTorrent expands its efforts, it could add tools for fans to pay artists directly, Mason said. At the same time, he said the company doesn\u2019t want to repeat its past mistakes, which include an unsuccessful experiment with opening a storefront (an effort that eventually led to the company giving back its Series C and downsizing dramatically). BitTorrent needs to focus on his strength, he said, namely \u201cmoving data,\u201d and around that core focus it aims to build whatever tools artists might need.<\/p>\n
Mason was willing to make one generalization about the way the music industry is changing. Music was once a \u201cfast-moving consumer good\u201d and could be marketed accordingly, he said. Now it\u2019s more \u201crelationship based.\u201d Instead of running an ad and trying to convince someone to buy a song or an album immediately, musicians need to focus on building a relationship, then in six months they can sell their fans a t-shirt or a digital download \u2014 and hopefully continue selling to those fans for the rest of their career.<\/p>\n
But doesn\u2019t that sound like a lot of work for relatively little reward? Mason countered that in the traditional system, convincing radio DJs to play your single wasn\u2019t easy, either.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a hard business \u2014 only 0.1 percent of people are going to make it,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s always going to be true. People ask me, \u2018Shouldn\u2019t artists have all the time in the world to create great music?\u2019 But most of the creative artists I\u2019ve had the fortune to work with have also been great hustlers. The hustle is changing, and what it means now is understanding data.\u201d<\/p>\n
Source: http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s been a big year for BitTorrent, said Matt Mason, the company\u2019s executive director of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}