Remember the promises made by executives promoting the debut of streaming services? Ten years ago can feel like a lifetime in the age of the internet, but if you try hard, you may recall people in power hailing the rise of streaming as the death of piracy. After all, why would someone steal an album or a movie when they can rent or buy one from the comfort of their own home? Why risk penalty when you can avoid illegal behavior for just a few dollars a month?
If we’ve learned anything in the last decade it’s that piracy won’t be eradicated anytime soon. In fact, since 2008, the amount of media pirated annually has more than doubled. Over hundreds of millions of people use services such as Spotify and Netflix around the world, yet piracy persists. Maybe it always will (we sure hope not).
Anyone claiming piracy is not an issue can now be shown further evidence that it is thanks to a new report from Canadian broadband management company Sandvine. The business, which tracks and studies internet usage, is known for releasing region-specific information regarding internet traffic. Their latest release focuses on the global internet community, and the results are quite surprising.
When all traffic from sources worldwide is combined, Netflix comes out as the clear winner with 13.75% of the total traffic share. The streaming giant is followed by HTTPS Media data (12.25%) and YouTube (10.51%) respectively.
BitTorrent comes in fifth place with 4.10% of all Internet traffic globally, which is mostly driven by the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) and APAC (Asia-Pacific) regions. BitTorrent is also responsible for roughly 22% of all upstream traffic. That’s nearly ¼ of the total information sent from computers to their network.
By comparison, Netflix accounts for just 15% of all downstream traffic (data received by computers).
“As expected, the top four applications are all video, and also not surprisingly, BitTorrent is fifth overall – strongly boosted by the utter dominance on the upstream in EMEA and APAC,” Sandvine’s Cam Cullen notes.
“This is a pretty significant number since downstream traffic is an order of magnitude larger than the upstream traffic totals worldwide.”
BitTorrent is not as popular in the United States as it once was, but global traffic for the service has been on the rise throughout 2018. There are ongoing arguments at the highest levels of entertainment over how to address the persistence of the service, as well as all other piracy outlets, but no meaningful solution has been found.
For musicians, the best way to prevent piracy is to protect their music with services such as Haulix, which provides secure and customizable digital promotion for talent at all levels of the business. For more information, as well as access to a one-month trial, visit haulix.com today.
Hello, everyone! Thank you for finding a few minutes in your schedule to spend with us. This post was created after learning of a fantastic new service made available from a company that would have been considered an industry pariah a decade ago. It’s a little crazy in theory, but it’s working to connect artists with their fans in a more direct way than ever before.
This blog exists to promote the future of the entertainment industry, and to do that we need input from people like you and your entertainment-loving friends. If you have any questions about the content in this article, or if you have an artist you would like to see featured on this blog, please contact james@haulix.com. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
Sitting at my desk this morning following a brief brainstorming session for the coming month of editorial content, I could not help thinking that a decade ago it would have been considering craze for someone to suggest promoting new music through BitTorrent. The service, which rose to fame/infamy because of its ties to illegal file sharing, has worked extremely hard to build a legitimate business out of questioning beginning in recent years. One of the biggest components of this positive resurgence has been the company’s ability to partner with innovative and influential members of pop culture to share content in a way that artists and other content creators are able to control from beginning to end. Their ‘Bundle’ series has partnered with everyone from G-Eazy to Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke in recent months, each offering a different variety of media and promotional materials, and every campaign has widely been considered a massive success. We’re not talking about thousands of engaged listeners, but millions, and they’re receiving content curated by the people who created it with little to no voice from the middle man (BitTorrent) bringing them together.
This week, roughly 18 months after launching in beta, BitTorrent has opened its digital magnetization platform BitTorrent Bundles to all musicians and other creators of digital content. I know there is a lot of skepticism around the idea of embracing a company once known as the knife slicing the achilles heel of the music industry, but a lot has changed in the last decade and BitTorrent are doing their best to leverage their massive user base in a way that promotes the continued support of creative people. You may have used services in the past that allowed for sharing of free media and other promotional materials, but none of them had the built-in audience, nor the transparency, that this service offers. For further explanation, we put together a list of three reasons artists, labels, and other industry folk should seriously consider using BitTorrent Bundles as part of their next promotional push. You can read those reasons, below. Those interested in signing up for access to the BitTorrent Bundles program can do so here.
1. The cost and distribution fees are so low it makes Apple look like a school yard bully.
Signing up for BitTorrent Bundles is absolutely free, as is choosing to share your material without a paywall, but if you choose to charge fans for access to your material BitTorrent will charge you for using their service. The company charges 10% of the purchase price of each Bundle plus about 5% in transaction fees. This is almost the exact same right as Bandcamp, not to mention being only a fraction of the $40+ distribution fees that are deducted from iTunes sales. And let’s not even get into how this compares to the average per stream payout offered by services like Spotify or Rdio.
2. The access to information you receive may be worth more than your financial gain
iTunes and Amazon Music are two of the biggest digital music stores in the world, and they’re recognized by almost anyone with an internet connection. Those are two facts that cannot be denied, and it’s completely understandable why artists choose to have their music on those sites even though the fees and costs associated may often be viewed as unfair. Something else these companies fail to do very well when working with artists is provide any information relating to the types of consumers who purchase their product. BitTorrent shares the email and other purchase data of every transaction with artists. That’s something almost no commercial competitor can offer.
When BitTorrent Bundles went public this week, Straith Schreder, director of content strategy for BitTorrent, spoke about how this lack of transparency hurts artists in the long run. “Platforms like iTunes take up to 40% of sales revenue – without disclosing fan contact information or data. Which means that, as an artist, you have no idea who’s buying your work, and how to reach them. To deprive artists of this data is to deprive them of the ability to build a viable business.”
3. In a world of tired ideas, BitTorrent Bundles are still considered ‘cool’
Though every John Hughes movie would like you to believe there is nothing wrong with staying far away from emerging trends and whatever it is the quote/unquote ‘cool’ kids are up to, a big component in digital marketing today is the ability to adapt the latest trending topic/craze to suit your needs. BitTorrent Bundles offer a low cost method of engaging fans with new and unreleased material that otherwise may never get to them without first cutting through miles and miles of industry nonsense. In a time where it’s harder than ever to forge lasting connections between two regular people, let alone a person and a brand, this service has found a way of reaching passionate music fans that has proven results for a large variety of talent. Anyone choosing to not try and further connect with their own fan base out of fear of being thought a sell out or something equally ridiculous need to realize their ego will forever hold them back from achieving their dreams. Embrace the now, embrace what’s popular, and find a way to make it your own.
