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Artists Make More Money in File-Sharing Age Than Before It
Burn Any Web-Hosted File into a Torrent With Burnbit
Hackers Target and Exploit Pirate Bay Ad Server

Artists Make More Money in File-Sharing Age Than Before It

Posted: 14 Sep 2010 04:48 AM PDT

An extensive study into the effect of digitalization on the music industry in Norway has shed an interesting light on the position of artists today, compared to 1999. While the music industry often talks about artists being on the brink of bankruptcy due to illicit file-sharing, the study found that the number of artists as well as their average income has seen a major increase in the last decade.

Every other month a new study addressing the link between music piracy and music revenues surfaces, but only a few really stand out. One of the most elaborate and complete studies conducted in recent times is the master thesis of Norwegian School of Management students Anders Sørbo and Richard Bjerkøe.

In their thesis, the students take a detailed look at the different revenue streams of the music industry between 1999 and 2009. By doing so, they aim to answer the question of how the digitization of music – and the most common side-effect, piracy – have changed the economic position of the Norwegian music industry and Norwegian artists. The results are striking.

After crunching the music industry’s numbers the researchers found that total industry revenue grew from 1.4 billion Norwegian kronor in 1999 to 1.9 billion in 2009. After adjusting this figure for inflation this comes down to a 4% increase in revenues for the music industry in this time period. Admittedly, this is not much of a growth, but things get more interesting when the research zooms in on artist revenue.

Music industry revenue corrected for inflation

norway music industry

In the same period when the overall revenues of the industry grew by only 4%, the revenue for artists alone more than doubled with an increase of 114%. After an inflation adjustment, artist revenue went up from 255 million in 1999 to 545 million kronor in 2009.

Some of the growth can be attributed to the fact that the number of artists increased by 28% in the same time period. However, per artist the yearly income still saw a 66% increase from 80,000 to 133,000 kronor between 1999 and 2009. In conclusion, one could say that artists are far better off now than they were before the digitization of music started.

Artist revenue corrected for inflation

norway music industry

Aside from looking at the reported revenue, the researchers also polled the artists themselves to find out what their income sources are. Here, it was found that record sales have never been a large part of the annual revenue of artists. In 1999, 70% of the artists made less than 9% of their total income from record sales, and in 2009 this went down to 50%.

Live performances are the major source of income for most artists. 37% of Norwegian artists made more than 50% of their income from live performances in 2009, up from 25% in 1999. That said, it has to be noted that only a few artists make a full living off their music, as most have other jobs aside.

In conclusion, the study refutes some of the most common misconceptions about the music industry in the digital age. Musicians are making more money than ever before. It is true that the revenues from record sales are dwindling, but that can be just as easily attributed to iTunes as The Pirate Bay.

The bottom line is that the music industry as a whole is thriving. Record labels may report a dip in their income from record sales, but more money is going to artists at the same time. Is that really such a bad outcome? Well, that depends on who you’re listening to.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Burn Any Web-Hosted File into a Torrent With Burnbit

Posted: 13 Sep 2010 02:00 PM PDT

Burnbit is a new service that allows users to generate a torrent for any file hosted online. It is especially useful for those who want to share large files with multiple people, at great speeds and without consuming too much bandwidth. Because the torrents are linked to a file hosted somewhere online, it will always be accessible and never die out.

burnbit Have you ever wanted to share a movie or any other file with a group of friends, colleagues or family? Then you have probably noticed that a regular hosting account may be too slow, or limited in the amount of bandwidth it provides. Here’s where BitTorrent comes in.

With BitTorrent you can quickly share a file among hundreds of people without any major hassles. The only problem is that you have to create a torrent file, host it and keep it seeded for as long as people want to download the file. But it can be even more convenient if you use Burnbit.

Burnbit is a new service which launched today. It’s aimed at people who are looking for a convenient and efficient way to share files via BitTorrent, without consuming too much bandwidth. After uploading a file to a web-server, Burnbit users can generate a torrent file to share with the public. By using a torrent users will save precious bandwidth, and since it is linked to a web-seed, the file will never die as long as the mirror is still in place.

Although Burnbit is a convenient way to generate torrents with a web-seed included, the process itself is nothing new. All the popular BitTorrent clients allow users to add a web-mirror nowadays. However, Burnbit users do have some additional advantages.

Firstly the service is pretty straightforward and uncomplicated, it only takes one click and the torrent is ready to share. The Burnbit site will host the torrent file and it also provides a download button that people can insert into their own blog or website. Another advantage for Burnbit users is that they can track various stats, like the download count and the number of seeds and leechers.

The only major downside to the service at the moment is that all files are public. There is no option to add a private file, which may hold people back from sharing a large photo archive or a semi-private movie with others. In addition it would be nice if one could add a custom title or description to the burned files.

TorrentFreak spoke to the owner of Burnbit who told us that they will take suggestions from the public to improve the site, and the privacy setting request was duly noted. At the time of its launch the site already indexes more than 150,000 files which the site’s crawlers have found while browsing the web. All the files have been automatically categorized, but users can add their own categories when they upload files.

The button below links to a high definition file of the latest TorrentFreak TV episode (download page). If you want to burn your own files you can head over to the Burnbit site and give it a try.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Hackers Target and Exploit Pirate Bay Ad Server

Posted: 13 Sep 2010 07:19 AM PDT

The advertising server of The Pirate Bay has been hacked and exploited to spread viruses and trojans among users of the site. The hackers targeted a vulnerability in the site's software to offload the malicious files, causing sections of The Pirate Bay to be blocked by Google, Firefox and several virus scanners.

With millions of visitors a day, torrent sites are a great outlet for spammers and scammers and others with malicious intent. Most recently, The Pirate Bay suffered from an attack by hackers who used an exploit in the site’s ad-server to offload malicious files.

A few hours ago, certain sections of The Pirate Bay were flagged by Google as containing malware and were subsequently blocked. Similar warnings were shown by Firefox and some virus scanners. Although The Pirate Bay didn’t host any malicious files, the site’s ads were pointing to several trojans and exploits.

These ads were not sanctioned by The Pirate Bay but were planted there by hackers who used an exploit in The Pirate Bay’s ad server to spread the files. The Pirate Bay ad server is running on OpenX, a popular ad serving platform based on phpAdsNew, which apparently has some unpatched vulnerabilities. Several other large sites that are using OpenX have reported similar problems recently.

The malicious ads found on The Pirate Bay in the last day were linking to external domains including cltomedia[dot]info where several trojans and exploits are hosted. As a result of the hack, Google, Firefox and various virus scanners listed The Pirate Bay as a malicious site, warning users who try to access it.

Frequent visitors to The Pirate Bay may recall that this is not the first time that the site has been flagged in this manner. Similar warnings have been issued several times before, and every time these were related to malicious ads. As it is the only part of the site where third parties have access to, this seems to be the most vulnerable element.

The Pirate Bay team informed TorrentFreak that they are currently working on resolving the problem. The vulnerabilities are expected to be fixed today and after a reinstall the world’s most popular torrent site should be working fine again. At the time of publishing, the warning by Google and others have already been lifted, but caution is advised.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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Tuesday, September 14, 2010