GarageSpin

Recently, BitTorrent was used to distribute hundreds of music files legally, wrote Wired. Garage bands and indie rockers benefit.

BitTorrent has garnered quite a lot of press, lately. Over the last few months, several Torrent sites including Suprnova and LokiTorrent have been shut down, with more likely to follow. BitTorrents P2P2P2P application, like a Napster run on nuclear steroids, allows users to download music, movies, and more in seconds. (See a description of the technology in an interview with Bram Cohen) Upgrades are on their way as well, such as WritTorrent. Hence content owners' fear of the application.

Leave it to creative, independent content owners to welcome technology breakthroughs. The South By Southwest music festival (SXSW), which provides an MP3 library of all bands performing in the event every year, is offering the entire library as an enormous, 2.6 GB BitTorrent file of more than 750 songs by 1,350 bands.

For added convenience, the music is integrated with a new application called SXSW4Pod from CitizenPod. Instead of carrying around the schedule of SXSW bands and venues as a dog-eared brochure, festival-goers can download the lineup electronically and transfer it to an iPod. ... At the festival, which starts next week, fans can search for shows by time, venue, genre or band name, and then listen to a full-quality MP3 of the band to see if they're any good.

SXSW would not have been able to overcome the bandwidth hurdle of such an offering without the help of BitTorrent.

You can download the SXSW file here.