Put it on your website and it will end up on a torrent site if anyone wants it.
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Been telling ppl they have a better chance of eventually blowing up on Funkwhale and then making money off their fans in the future than they do organically any other way now. Im delusional about the fediverse tho.
Nothing to worry about unless you've signed a contract with someone. Normally when you sign with a record label you're selling them the rights to your music, so they could sue you if you try to give it away or sell it without them being involved. Record labels are known to be pretty predatory...
If you have access to certain music-focused private torrent trackers, many will do spotlight articles on independent or smaller artists who are also members.
This kind of sharing is often welcomed and a valued thing, so could even be a way in to some of those communities.
Redacted does this, and I've been introduced to some really good music this way.
Alternately, as others have noted, Bandcamp is a good way to offer as well. If you go this route, even with setting the music as free, you might make some small money... I've often tipped a bit via the "Pay what you want" pricing tier.
Thanks :) What are private torrent trackers? And what is Redacted?
Yes, I may use Bandcamp too or perhaps Faircamp, which you can host yourself. Bandwagon and Funkwhale appeal to me a lot as well, for the federation.
Private trackers are closed communities for sharing torrents. Often you can either interview to get access, or occasionally one with have open sign up for access. These usually have strict requirements to maintain a reasonable ratio of seeding for your downloads to prevent greedy users from ruining performance of sharing.
Redacted is one of these communities, based strictly around music and maintaining quality, refusing to allow low quality encoding of the data. It is harder to get into the community, as well as very strict seeding requirements to maintain.
Information about who they are and how to apply for access can all be found at https://interviewfor.red/
Also checkout orpheus alongside redacted. Smaller site but significant overlap with redacted, many have accounts with both. You can 'crosspost' your music torrents to both.
https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/
Read that for a start. And maybe consider sharing your work under a nice license. You can also check out platforms like Jamendo, Bandcamp, the Internet Archive... And as far as I understand archive.org will even handle generating some torrents for you.
+1 for Jamendo and CC licenses
What are your thoughts on Jamendo from an artists point of view?
I can't speak as an artist as I ain't one, but as someone who loves listening and discovering new music, Jamendo is great. There are many artists I listen daily that I only know because of it.
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On the technical side of things, in order to create a torrent, you can just use something like QBittorrent to do the job. I've never uploaded something to a public tracker, but private trackers just have you fill out a form and upload the torrent file. Be sure to seed it, obviously.
Thanks 👍 I already use QBittorrent for downloading so I will look at that. What does it mean to 'seed' a file? And would the QBittorrent application need to be open constantly for this to work? If so, I may see about installing it on a VPS instead.
Seeding is a good way to be a good pirate. Some sites show your seed to leech ratio. As a rule of thumb, I usually try to seed double what I leech, but if I find something niche without a lot of seeders I try to maintain until the seeder rate becomes healthy. Simply put, you just don't delete or stop the torrent after its completely downloaded and don't quit your client. Just let it keep going.
You may find that your internet speed drops when seeding. In that case, most clients have a way to cap your upload speeds. Most modern internet speeds can keep up though; it used to be required way back when dial-up and DSL was more prevalent. You know, the good old times of spending three days downloading a movie to find out that it was scat porn.
The torrent protocol works by having uploader (seeders) users sharing their files to downloader users (leechers). Users are topically both seeders and leechers.
With that in mind, to seed a file means to share it with others. And yes, you need your torrent client open for that. QBitTorrent is amazing and doesn't have much overhead in your system, plus you can limit your upload speed and net upload. Some console-based torrent apps are even lighter. No VPS required unless you have specific constraints.
Funkwhale is a federated music sharing platform. In addition to some of the good suggestions here, maybe add that into your mix.
Yes, I will definitely be looking into Funkwhale. Bandwagon looks really exciting too.
A lot of people use bandcamp.. probably the least corporate of the online platforms
Isn't Bandcamp owned by Epic Games?
Not anymore. They are owned by Songtradr now
Good to know, but I also know nothing about Songtradr.
No idea. But they seem to be creator friendly.
On top of what everyone else has said you could always use soulseek as a way to get it out there
Thanks. How does Soulseek work?
It’s peer-to-peer like torrents, but on its own network. Use can share anything but it’s primarily used for music. You set a folder to share from and if someone looks up a file you have, they can download it from you.
What this dude said.
Great, thank you 👍
I release music. I use a low cost platform for distribution. There are free ones. I understand your position because I feel similarly.
I never expect to make money or get recognized, but I think my music is good enough to share. To do that, you need a distributor and to be on the major platforms.
Look into Soundrop. You can also put your stuff on bandcamp for free, but at least get it out as widely as you can.
Is Soundrop the distributor you use? I'll have a look.
Yes. It's like $9 for a perpetual release. I used Amuse.io before, but they suck you in and hit you with fake fees after you're on their service.
Maybe bandcamp and youtube?
I might use Bandcamp but I don't want my music to be on youtube or spotify.
With the utmost respect - if your music reaches enough people its going to end up on YouTube like it or not, especially under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. But I respect not wanting to endorse the platform yourself.
Leave a text file along with your music including a donation link and thanking people for listening.
I've heard more than a handful of artists getting some money that way after putting their own albums up on torrent/file-share sites.
If you're releasing in a format that supports tagging, there's usually either a comment field or custom field that you could put this into in as well.
Will do 👌 I'm not familiar with websites to upload to - the only experience I have so far is searching for files within Qbittorrent, which I believe is using search plugins... How can I find these sites? Thanks
Did you release it through a publisher of some kind? If not, it wouldn't matter because you have the full rights and the onus would be on you to take legal action in anyone that downloaded it.
Nothing is released yet. I would be happy for people to download my music to listen to without restrictions, which is why I'm looking into making it available as torrents.
im just posting on my personal instance at thejoyo.com
there's a popular electronic producer that had their shit stolen by Apple back when iTunes was a thing and they published their music for torrenting and found some support from that.
the flashbulb
I fucking love the flashbulb. Way underrated. Been my favorite artist for almost 20 years now.
yah, i only recently got into synths and watched some of benn Jordan's yt videos and when he mentioned his music my jaw dropped. ive been listening to them for decades as the flashbub.
He released some glitch/acid jazz stuff under the name acidwolf thats pretty good too, but not as good imo. The range of his flashbulb stuff is just incredible though, and i dont think hes ever made a song i dont like
What is your instance running? I can see that it's federated but I don't recognise it. Thanks :)
goto social, it implements a mastodon api but is a lot more light weight and focused on smaller user base.
i switched to it right around the pleroma akkoma split and it's been great since. tho now i have that annoying trusted proxy message that i thought i fixed but caddy wont fwd.
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