What are Torrents exactly?

“BitTorrents,” have grown in popularity among sick musos like myself. If it has not yet officially replaced trading as the primary means of live music dissemination, it very soon will. There are far too many advantages to this mode for it not to continue to increase in popularity. It will inevitably make trading a footnote in music collecting history (speaking of which, isn’t about time for an update to Clinton Heylin’s excellent Bootleg?) CD trading will eventually become a piece of nostalgia, much like vinyl records and mix tapes.

At its best, BitTorrent offers several advantages classic trading cannot challenge. BitTorrent is far faster than trading; instead of having to find someone willing to trade, retrieving the necessary CDs from whatever maximum-security vault the collector has designed, burning the CDs, packaging the CDs, and mailing the CDs, all BitTorrent takes is some free software and a PC with burning capabilities, and a user is free to download shows until he falls asleep or his spouse leaves him.

BitTorrent has also substantially increased the amount of live music in circulation. The effort of having to search individual trade lists to find a specific show is now practically non-existent. A simple post to a torrent message board will usually yield a generous collector willing to seed the show, regardless of how rare or hard to find a specific show might be. In this way, BitTorrent has made it remarkably easy to efficiently acquire new live music.