I'm just finished downloading Ghosts I from The Pirate Bay and I'm giving it a listen. Already the release is significant as a rejection of the old, increasingly obsolete music industry business model. The entire release is Ghosts I-IV with Ghosts I being released for free under a Creative Commons non-commercial license and uploaded by the musicians to various bittorrent sites. The rest of the release is divided into tiers. For $5 one can purchase all the music (36 tracks) in lossy and lossless digital formats. For $10 one can buy all the digital music as well as receive a 2-CD set of the music. The $75 package includes a data DVD with the actual tracks which can be used for remixing. And there was a limited edition $300 option which has already sold all 2500 copies which alone earned $75,000. Not bad for a band forsaking the major record labels. For more details: http://ghosts.nin.com/

I’ve been reviewing various BitTorrent tracker software and I’ve decided that what I think makes the most sense is a fast dedicated tracker and a separate front-end. I was a fan of CBTT in the past but that project, like the rest of the BNBT derivatives, appears defunct. XBTT, however, continues to be improved. And I came across a useful page on getting XBTT running on Debian. I think XBTT combined with a Rails-based front-end might make for a great BitTorrent tracker site. Perhaps XBTT could even be packaged at some point.

• http://xbtt.sourceforge.net/tracker/
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbtt/