So in 2007 (or was it 2008) we started FrostClick to give it a bit more structure to our mission of leveling the playing field for content creators all over the world.
Meeting hundreds of content creators, downloading and listening to thousands of songs, and a few million legal shares later, our dream of sharing free content on FrostWire has started to take more meaning, and we’re starting to get so much great feedback in regards to our FrostClick/FrostWire project that we know we are on the right path.
In the process, we developed an Android app (which is being re-written for BitTorrent support as I write this), and we learned from scratch as much as we could about BitTorrent to make FrostWire (we think) a BitTorrent client for the rest of us. All of this has built our confidence to embark on a much more ambitious project that we are sure we’ll be able to deliver, but only with your help.
Here we go…
If you put together all the unsigned bands on MySpace, Bandcamp, Jamendo, Free Music Archive (and a huge list of sites we’ve compiled throughout 2011) you end up with millions of singers/bands.
In a world on which media distribution has changed fundamentally thanks to the internet and digital media, culture has quickly changed, as always faster than our legislators. Many content creators of all walks of life are over and over repeating the same thing. We don’t need intermediaries, writers, musicians, film makers, are taking distribution in their hands and handing out content to you for free, so you enjoy it, so you get to know them.
In some cases, they will just give you a taste so you buy the rest, in some cases they will give you the whole thing and leave it up to you to pay, in some cases they even let you sell their content and remix it.
They have realized they gain more by sharing than locking away their content. When you take Big media out of the picture, 50% of distribution costs go away, another 40% fo commission costs go away, therefore sharing makes a hell of a lot of sense, since it’s free promotion. Your content speaks for you, and by being open more business models open up organically to you. Your music can end up in movies, commercials, documentaries; If you become known you’ll make a lot more by wearing a piece of clothing of X brand than selling copies, you can become the channel (if you’re into that).
However, now we face a new challenge, how do we find all of this. Our first step has been to integrate several general purpose bittorrent search engines into FrostWire, and manually researching and listening to your recommendations, which end up every day in the form of 2 or 3 daily posts on FrostClick.com.
Say that there’s only 3 million bands/singers all over the world, and that each one is willing to share under Creative Commons at least 5 songs, that leaves us with at least 15 million songs to discover, that’s about 30 years worth of music we’d have to go through, a humble team like ours just cannot do that, but millions of people could do it in less than a month and help us rate it, review it, share it.
Now add to that all the free content in the form of free software, video games, papers, books, short films, documentaries… the amount of free content available is enormous. Beautiful isn’t it? And to think all these years we’ve been told what to listen to, what to buy, when we could be having so much fun just discovering the magical talents of all of us. Our technological reality now allows for this and we think given our know how in Free Content and Computer Sciences we will show you the way to get to all of this content with jut a few keystrokes.
If you haven’t guessed it by now, yes, we are currently indexing all the free content in the world, and we need your help.
It’s in our plans, that in 2012 you will see another checkbox on the FrostWire search filters that will say “FrostClick”, and which will show you results out of millions of songs, videos, books, and free software we’re currently indexing.
Not only that, we’re also building the next generation of FrostClick.com. We believe tools like crowd-sourcing, machine-learning, social networking, affinity algorithms, we’ll be able to make the discovery process easier for you.
We’ll need to grow our community for these content discovery efforts, we’ll need artists, developers, bloggers, and passionate content creators willing to tell their stories about sharing to make it all happen.
These are our dreams, let’s dream together.
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