Sick of Sarah – The First Label Backed Band Release To Be Freely Distributed To Fans via BitTorrent
How do you reach 100 million would be fans? If you're Eminem, you star in a couple of Super Bowl ads. If you're Sick of Sarah, you release your album via BitTorrent. Adamant Records, their label, has posted a tutorial on torrents and how they work on their home page.
Last year, BitTorrent started a pilot program that asked artists to let them freely distribute their creative works. At the time, Yes Men and Pioneer One, as well as PAZ, were the only ones to have tried their luck with this service. Josh Bernhard, Writer/Executive Producer, of Pioneer One told Hypebot that from his perspective BitTorrent provided an opportunity to get his stuff seen.
"With 2 million downloads of the Pioneer One pilot within 6 weeks of release, we're getting attention from people interested in advertising to those numbers," he writes. "We couldn't have done this any other way." Sick of Sarah has a similar take. Their fans use BitTorrent. Jamie Holm, the group's bassist, thinks BitTorrent will help them drive new fans to live concerts and purchase their merchandise.
The Minneapolis, MN group has been around since 2005 and gained much acclaim recently, but there's no other way for them to reach an audience of this size. Top 40 radio isn't their game and college radio can only take you so far.
Sick of Sarah's latest album "2205" will be promoted extensively throughout BitTorrent and be available for free download. The hope is that that by distributing their album in this manner they will benefit in the long haul and reach a truly global and diverse audience of music fans and arr music pirates. In the coming weeks, Hypebot will attempt to interview Adamant Records and Sick of Sarah.
Stay tuned.
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Would you put this video on your label site? Adamant Records did.
BitTorrent, Explained. from BitTorrent, Inc. on Vimeo.
This is great and honestly makes so much sense it’s ridiculous. Just recently I decided to revisit distributing music via torrents. Nearly ten years ago I was doing it through p2p’s like Napster and SoulSeek and getting sales because of it. People will speak adversely about this because they simply don’t get it and most of their minds are stuck in models of promotions that never proved to work for them in the first place. In an era ‘Free’ why wouldn’t you take advantage of those numbers?
Yeah this is total bullshit, considering my label’s been doing this for several years now with our artists – as well as hundreds of other labels out there – so this band is definitely not “The first” to do anything in this arena. I can only imagine how original they think their music is.
lol
I mean "first" within the context of this promotion that BitTorrent has offered.
I think though the concept isn’t new how the band approached the promotion and partnered with BitTorrent is a fresh way of releasing an album.
Thinking outside the box.
Wow Nick, You sound bitter. You can’t bash the band just because someone writes about them and is giving them attention. I don’t read anywhere that the band claims to be the first ones at anything.