BitTorrent Sites: How the Internet Makes Us All DJs

Jorge Franganillo/Flickr

That's what a modern MP3 depository feels like: the desk of a newspaper's music section, or even the counter at a busy record store. You're buried in every new CD imaginable and connected to a network of friendly music geeks. The heft of such access intoxicates.

Other outlets have written about the world's biggest BitTorrent music sites, and Gizmodo's piece from February is spot-on. In short, such sites connect thousands of users to each other's files in a very simplified way. If you want to download, say, Bob Dylan's early home demos, type his name into a given site's search bar, and you'll connect to every other person with the same files. When the next person searches for those demos, your computer joins the fray, helping them download in a continual sharing loop.

Users are encouraged not to publicize the site names, and even if you tried Googling them, you'd pull up impenetrable log-in pages. yet these hidden music sites are not ugly, virus-ridden bastions of piracy. They're beautiful, efficient, and full of every album imaginable, particularly bootleg recordings, out-of-print releases, and copyright-free material (often recorded by the sites' members). One such site, indietorrents.net, has particularly stark rules disallowing any music from RIAA-affiliated record labels.

The quality control, the built-from-scratch framework, and slick recommendation systems are all hallmarks of portals that rival even iTunes, and that they were designed by fans who accept no money for their labors of love makes such depositories all the more impressive. All the same, these sites do not aspire to serve as iTunes, Pandora, or even Pitchfork. They do not distill the music-gathering process. You do not type in a frequency and expect a tailored genre or mood.

That fact is refreshing. It does not speak to the simplicity of BitTorrent outlets - even with their recommendation tools and top-ten lists, their loads of content require a learning curve - but to the terrible state of the American music establishment as we know it. If we want to try great music for free, with the scale and convenience that radio once allowed, it's our only option.

We have become the DJs, and our musical-recommendation ecosystem, as a result, has become the world's biggest jigsaw puzzle. Who do we trust for music picks lately, anyway? A phony DJ trapped in a national playlist? Some dork down the block with a blog? The 40 minutes a day that MTV plays music? The counter at Starbucks? None of those work on a large scale, as far as presenting a consistent musical point of view with the right number of surprises; that's what we used to enjoy with any given format's best station in a big city.

Armed as DJs, we really only lack one thing to take our wide-open musical access and turn it into something revolutionary: cell phone radio. Not just Pandora's "if you like this, you'll love this" database, but a legitimate, open network of radio that Internet-enabled phones can tap into at any time. It'd be powered by GPS data to pick out local voices in any city. Makeshift DJs, sorted by genre, could serve a mix of expected joys and surprise wonders to all fans (not just college-radio's narrow, blog-friendly archetype).

It'd even pay for itself. Small banner ads on a cell phone screen would replace traditional "interrupt-the-song" breaks to pay for costs and licensing fees, and if users are willing to build complex torrent sites for free, surely they'd upgrade to a paid pittance for curating daily radio shows. Best of all, more access to random music for the average user means more money spent on music, period.

Internet radio was a precious idea, but cell phone radio would spread further and wider, thanks to the same reason terrestrial radio still matters: anytime, anywhere access. The smartphone revolution finally makes my years-long dream a potential reality.

In the meantime, MP3 depositories have boosted the Internet's population of CD clerks and music writers, who swim in an endless supply of great, challenging, and far-reaching tunes. They try, and then they buy. Until my dream comes to fruition, we, the "pirates," will continue enjoying the closest thing we have to an old-school radio station.

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