Digital Bazar Announces Bitmunk – A Legal, Copyright-Aware, Peer-to-Peer Network For Music, Movies

Venturing into the online file distribution scene today, Digital Bazar, Inc. announced a new service called Bitmunk that solves the biggest problem in peer-to-peer file trading – making sure the artists and labels get paid. Their highly innovative solution: pay the consumers to distribute their favorite music while ensuring a cut for the artists.

“Bitmunk is not an online music store, rather it is a digital file marketplace.” said Manu Sporny, co-founder and President/CEO of Digital Bazar, Inc. “We are fixing the biggest problem with file trading networks – the inability to pay for stuff that you want to legally own by downloading.”

Peer-to-peer file trading has long been blamed for the downward-spiraling music industry. “We are offering up a different business model, one that works for consumers, artists and labels.” said Sporny.

Bitmunk allows any artist to list their songs for sale, associating a royalty with each song or album. No matter who sells the work on Bitmunk, the artist always gets the royalty deposited directly into their bank account. Anybody can re-sell the files thus ensuring that every artist always has the option of a mass distribution channel.

“There is no such thing as an illegal file on Bitmunk,” said Dave Longley, CTO of Digital Bazar, “Every file on our network has been cleared by the artist for sale”. This ensures that anybody re-selling the file on Bitmunk is allowed to do so and collect a fee for providing the song on the network.

The company has provided a preview version of their software and service, code-named Bitmunk Beta, for the general public to use. “We wanted to get people to use the service without any risk, fees or royalties attached,” said Sporny, “Making everybody comfortable with this new distribution concept before we roll out the final service is vital.” Bitmunk will be available for free use for the next several months, “We want to get feedback from all the people that this affects, including consumers, artists and labels, to ensure that we’re tailoring a service that will once and for all solve the peer-to-peer dilemma.” added Longley.