Music « Digital Bazaar

Bitmunk 3.2.3: Speed Improvements

Published June 9th, 2010

It has only been one month since our last release, either we are getting good at building and releasing software, or we got lucky. We’ll let you decide. Improvements in this release include:

Networking Speed – We have improved Monarch’s already impressive HTTP networking stack by greatly improving the number of simultaneous requests we can process per second. This not only improves the Bitmunk website, but all of the PaySwarm peer-to-peer software. Performance results will be published soon.
Website Responsiveness – A number of changes have been made to reduce page load times. We have focused on Javascript minimization, resource caching and compression.

Read on to find out the details…

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Bitmunk 3.2.2: Good Relations and Greening

Published May 6th, 2010

We are happy to announce the latest release of the Bitmunk Website and the PaySwarm software. It has been three months since our last release. This launch has a number of new features that are pretty exciting:

Green Computing – We have replaced the standard Apache+PHP+Smarty web server stack with the Monarch Web server stack. This has improved performance by 468% and reduced the number of servers we need by a factor of 4. Reducing our carbon footprint by 4x is not only green, but greatly reduces long-term operating and maintenance costs as well.
Semantic Web – We have published a new set of over 74 million pieces of machine-readable data in our pages, 11 million of which consist of pricing data via the Good Relations Vocabulary. We are using RDFa to publish the data.
The Experience – Finding and buying what you want is now faster, with less annoying screens in the way between you and your music. The PaySwarm software now supports Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit versions).

Read on to find out more…

Bitmunk 3.2: The Legal P2P Music Network

Published November 30th, 2009

Today, we launched Bitmunk Personal Edition 3.2 – the first piece of software in the world to enable collaborative content distribution. Bitmunk is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser. This release adds the ability to sell DRM-free music from your computer, on behalf of artists, via an open, standards-based, peer-to-peer network.

We will be working toward standardizing this technology for web browsers over the next several years. This work will establish a world-wide, open mechanism for the distribution of digital content via web browsers that not only benefit artists, but fans as well. In short – when a file is traded using Bitmunk 3.2, the artist is paid and the fan is paid. You can legally resell the music you buy via the network and get paid for the bandwidth you contribute to the sale.

This is a bold new approach to music distribution. We certainly think it is inevitable that digital content will eventually be distributed in this way. Here’s how it works…

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An Open Digital Media Commerce Standard

Published September 28th, 2009

This article outlines how Digital Bazaar, since 2007, has been using Semantic Web Technology to establish a set of open mark-up and communication standards for Web-based, peer-to-peer marketplaces. The system that Digital Bazaar has created, called Bitmunk, is used to transact digital media such as music, movies, television and books between independent agents on the Web. The decentralzied nature of the peer-to-peer marketplace requires flexible, open standards for communication and knowledge representation…

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The Pirate Bay and Building an Equitable Culture

Published August 30th, 2009

The latest site to gain the full attention and ire of the RIAA, MPAA, and copyright holders worldwide is The Pirate Bay (TPB). Or rather, it was the Pirate Bay until their owners were raided, sued, tried and sentenced earlier this month. The Pirate Bay is the latest link in a long chain of peer-to-peer companies that have met their end at the hands of international copyright law. It is also the target of a post-litigation buy-out attempt by a company who wants to monetize the over 25 million community members of TPB…

Bitmunk 3.1: Browser-based P2P Commerce

Published June 29th, 2009

Today marks a significant milestone in the evolution of the Bitmunk peer-to-peer commerce platform. The software release that went live earlier today is the culmination of over 26 months of development, hundreds of thousands of lines of code writes and re-writes and the dream of a small group of us that are trying to fundamentally change the way people buy and sell digital goods on the Internet.

On the surface, Bitmunk looks much like a web-based digital content store specializing in MP3 music sales. People can come to the site and purchase songs and albums for very competitive prices (cheaper than iTunes and Amazon.com).

There is, however, a deeper history and a grander goal for Bitmunk…

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A Collaborative Distribution Model for Music

Published April 4th, 2009

The music industry, via Choruss, is shopping a new music licensing model around to universities in the United States. Like some before it, this one attempts to address the still rampant music piracy occurring via peer-to-peer networks by enforcing a pseudo-mandatory collective licensing agreement on every student attending a participating university. There were a number of very interesting parts to the proposal that we would like to work on improving with Choruss and any partner universities. There were also a few propositions that we think are harmful to the industry, artists and fans as a whole.

It should be no surprise that we think that any sort of mandatory collective licensing is a very bad idea, as is the “covenant not to sue” approach that Choruss is currently pursuing. Voluntary collective licensing, as proposed by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is not a good alternative either…

Bitmunk 3.0 Website Launches

Published July 3rd, 2008

Today, is a big milestone – the release of the Bitmunk 3.0 website. This is a release that has been in the making for 18 months. While much of the functionality facing our customers has not changed, everything behind the scenes has received a huge update. You can still search, browse, and purchase music and…

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Over One Million Songs Available on Bitmunk

Published October 29th, 2007

When Bitmunk launched over three years ago, we had 3,280 songs available for sale. Bitmunk was the first peer-to-peer distribution platform out there that was DRM-free and rewarded fans for trading songs by giving them a cut of the sale. It brought the record companies, music fans and music distributors together. We knew we were…

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Bitmunk Launches World’s First Open Music Recommendation Service

Published September 9th, 2007

Finding independent musicians is hard enough when you’re trawling through music blogs. With the advent of the Internet, the number of indies out there has exploded in the past several years. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just enter the name of an artist that you like and get a list of suggested albums…

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Bitmunk, Microformats and the Semantic Web

Published April 24th, 2007

If there is one thing we do well at Digital Bazaar, it is think BIG. One of our desires is to enact globally positive change in the music industry. This blog post is about one of our internal projects that is going to do just that. It is cryptically called the “Semantic Wusic” project –…

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Bitmunk acquires over 800,000 songs – 63,000 artists

Published February 12th, 2007

Bitmunk achieved a very important milestone today, with over 800,000 DRM-free songs on our network, we continue to be the largest legal DRM-free peer-to-peer network in the world. Over 63,000 artists have signed up with Bitmunk so far – we pay each artist almost ten times as much as a typical large record label –…

The First Open Source P2P Digital Content Transaction Platform in History

Published January 15th, 2007

To build and launch the first copyright-respecting P2P Digital Content Transaction Platforms in the world is no small feat. We are here because of the extraordinary efforts of volunteers that donate their time to open source software. Linux, Apache, Python, PHP, MySQL, and Lustre are just a few of the open source technologies that we…

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Where does your entertainment dollar go?

Published December 1st, 2006

Where does your entertainment dollar go? How much should you be paying for music, movies and cable television? You would be surprised to find out how much of it is not going to the places you want it to go. This article proposes a new method of distributing media that benefits the people that matter…

Newsvine Article on Bitmunk

Published November 30th, 2006

Killfile at Newsvine has written a nice piece on us: “The system is elegant in its simplicity. Bitmunk capitalizes upon the scalability of peer to peer networking, allowing each purchaser to function as a quasi-independent retailer to other customers. This model allows Digital Bazaar to compensate not only artists for their music but Bitmunk users…

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Bitmunk 2.0 Launches!

Published November 28th, 2006

We are very proud to announce the version 2.0 launch of our software and technology. Bitmunk 2.0 is a significant improvement over the version 1.0 software and technology. Most significant is the integration of the Bitmunk Buying Engine and Bitmunk Personal Sales Server technology. The Bitmunk Personal Edition 2.0 software is capable of doing many…

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Create your very own online music store!

Published March 28th, 2005

We’ve released version 1.0 of our P2P Sales Server software that allows anyone to sell music straight from their own computer. With this technology you’ll be able to put your music collection up for sale on the Internet. The more artists we get signed up with Bitmunk (it’s free to sign up!) the more music…

Billboard Magazine Blogs About Bitmunk

Published March 15th, 2005

Billboard is blogging about us. From the article: “The best part according to the report, is that the agreement allows any CD Baby artist to distribute their digital music via the Bitmunk network while retaining the vast majority of the sales revenue. The innovative business model facilitates the sale of “used media files” that can…

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Music Distribution Agreement with CD Baby

Published March 14th, 2005

We have successfully acquired a music distribution agreement with CD Baby. This is big news as they are the first company to commit to our business model and technology. The process was painless, they really understand the possibilities of digital distribution. We will announce the number of available titles at a later time, but this…

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Article on Bitmunk at Online Reporter

Published August 7th, 2004

The Online Reporter has done a very nice article about us. Visit their site and take a look. Online Reporter: Digital Bazaar’s Bitmunk Legal P2P Network Takes On Online Music Stores

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