As promised, FrostWire for Android is now open source. Android Hackers welcome for patch submissions.

“While the major record labels see BitTorrent as a threat, thousands of independent musicians believe it’s one of the best ways to gain an audience. The FrostWire BitTorrent client has been promoting independent artists for years, with great success. To celebrate a massive 2.4 million downloads in 2011, FrostWire just released a compilation album featuring free Creative Commons-licensed tracks from 30 artists.

With all the negative talk about BitTorrent, fueled by the billion dollar entertainment industries, it’s refreshing to see that many of the people who actually create the music are using it to further their careers.

Tens of thousands of musicians, from those just starting out to those already established, use BitTorrent to give away their music for free.

One of the BitTorrent clients that helps these artists to get noticed is FrostWire. In 2008, the client introduced its FrostClick service through which it promotes independent artists, and not without success.

With help from FrostWire, independent musicians reach a bigger audience than many of the artists signed by major labels. In the last year alone, 2.4 million people downloaded the albums promoted by FrostWire, and according to the artists who were featured, it pays off.

“FrostWire jumpstarted my music career by giving away my album for free to over 130,000 people,” says female rapper Kellee Maize in a comment. “Paying for that type of exposure would have cost me over $50,000 on other outlets such as taking out Facebook ads or Google Adsense.”

Make sure you get the mixtape

But there are many reasons that impede us creating a port for iOS:

1. Our application is licensed under the GPL, The GPL license is in conflict with the terms of the App Store. Many GPL applications have been pulled out because some organizations denounce them to Apple (just like VLC Player was pulled out)

2. A file sharing application like ours has very little chance of being accepted in the App Store.

3. We’d have to code everything again using Objective-C, this would take a long time to happen, and for the 2 reasons above our little team has preferred to create FrostWire for Android instead (almost the same technology and no issues with the Android market)

We do see the many users that come to our site with iPhones, iPods and iPads, and it sucks we’re hands tied. Maybe we’ll figure out a way to get there.

Yes! The time has finally come. It was a thrilling ride all throughout 2011; a ride that led us to discover some truly amazing artists whose music made our mornings worth getting up and turned each evening into one unforgettable party!

Today we want to celebrate all that talent and over 2.3 Million Free and Legal Downloads our promotions generated only during 2011.

We proudly present to you the Second official FrostClick/FrostWire mixtape. And just as before, all of the music in this compilation is available as a free download under Creative Commons. So get yours now and open your ears to some new great quality music!

The mixtape comes as a great way to remind you, our awesome reader, of all of the hits that were featured here on the pages of FrostClick or that were promoted on FrostWire in the past months (you haven’t miss any, right?); it is also a great way to showcase the best of the best to those of you who more recently joined our community.

Unlike our first release which celebrated 1,000,000 downloads and 21 artists, this time around we decided to treat you with even more musical goodness! Alongside 18 amazing artists that were featured on FrostWire and whose work was downloaded 2,382,742 times and counting (make sure to check below for the more detailed numbers), we have included another 12 musicians we wrote about on our website that were too good not to share.

From the lush indie pop melodies, powerful electronic synths, and hip hop madness, to the more original pieces, we have it all.

FrostClick presents: FrostWire Creative Commons Mixtape 2.

What’s inside?

What you get is 30 artists, 31 songs, and 1hr 57min of total bliss. The mixtape is composed of Side A, which includes a song from all the albums previously or currently promoted through FrostWire (to find out how to be promoted click here) and Side B with a selection of some of the best artists we featured here on FrostClick.com.

The compilation comes equipped with high quality mp3s and a digital booklet with the content information, licenses for each song, and links to album reviews here on FC, in case you want to see the face hiding behind the music that is blasting from your speakers.

Side A (With Download Numbers)
FrostWire Creative Commons Mixtape Vol. 2 Side A by FrostClick.com

Side B
FrostWire Creative Commons Mixtape Vol. 2 Side B by Various Artists

Ever since November of 2008 we set the goal of bringing you the world class content creators that were willing to share their work for free. We think we did pretty good (hopefully you do too), but we also know there are still many talented musicians out there we ought to find about … if you know one of them let us know on the forum.

So if you like what you hear be sure to comment, tell us which artist stole your heart (and speakers!), and spread the word! And remember to follow us as we are coming back… with more.

ENJOY!

The first time you listen to Fever Sleeves, you might find it hard to put a finger on their brand of music. On one hand, you have this beautiful calculated math rock sound while on the other, it’s a noise fest filled with random guitars, hazy vocals and unconventional drumming.

Soft Pipes, Play On is the band’s debut record, it might be two years old but with just one listen you can tell that there’s something special about it. The band hails from San Diego, CA and have been around since 2004. Their first single, Futuristic Killings, paved the way for the band’s much anticipated full length debut back in 2009.

Sigmafly: Tetrachrome EP – a free release from Cut Ever since their start, Cut Records has become a musical haven for anybody looking for some awesome electronic ambient releases. The best part is that each of their releases is available as a free or ‘pay with a tweet’ download. Truly a great treat.

This time around, they’re featuring Sigmafly’s first release under the label, Tetrachrome EP. Filled with 7 moody electronic singles; it mixes atmospheric beats with carefully chosen samples.

JoJo: Can’t Take That Away From Me – soulful pop R&B beats The once young JoJo is now a woman and she proves it in her beautifully composed and executed album, Can’t Take That Away From Me.

Exclusively released last September 2010 to Rap-Up.com, this free mixtape is a prelude to the singer’s third album formerly entitled All I Want Is Everything. The said album was then released as Jumping Trains under BlackGround records due to a misunderstanding with the songbird’s former record label.

The Julys – self titled hipster 50s rock If you’re in the mood for some uptempo indie rock, listening to the The Julys is a good place to start. According to their facebook bio, the band started off “as two young men coping with the loss of their respective harpy women.”

They’ve certainly come a long way since then. Now, the band is a quartet that creates some really good and catchy indie rock mixes. Instead of bitter, heart wrenching lyrics; the band takes on a feel-good disposition; filling their sound with bouncy beats, hipster style guitars and some wild Little Richard-style singing.

Download Album

Before this you might not have heard of Vanatei [Va-neeh-tee], and after, you’ll either find your next favorite female rapper or move on to find somebody else. I’m not exactly big on female rappers myself, but the few that I’ve discovered I actually really liked. One of the latest female MCs I’ve come across is Vanatei.

This spunky girl from Newark, New Jersey is not just a rapper but also an advertising guru. [She set up and manages her own advertising business.] Her skills as a rapper is something to rave about as well, with her album Dis Bish Got Moola, showcasing her knack for creating catchy beats while spitting out stark lyrics and producing good rhythm. 

Vanatei has always loved rapping. In her interview over at Securitypleeze, the singer admits to creating and jotting down rhymes on paper since she was 11 or 12 and likens her style to a combo of Big Pun, M.I.A. and Kelis. Indeed, her lyrics are quite raw, focusing more on her experiences and simply being true to her “hustlin’ lifestyle.”

The carrier single, Dis Bish Got Moola, has a nice catchy beat and a laid-back hip hop feel. Plus, the recording quality is quite good. From the onset you’ll recognize that she definitely has something to bring to the table in terms of skill and style. Her vocals are quite strong and authoritative, commanding listeners at every turn.

Meanwhile, her other track, Bitch You Ain’t A Barbie, has generated quite a controversy among YouTube commenters since it first came out. Most of them think that the song is a diss to Nicki. Whatever the case may be, the song is pretty cool. It contains tight beats and comes with honest lyrics. It also features another female rapper, Semi.

There’s no denying that Dis Bish Got Moola has its gems. Vanatei’s talent is hard to ignore, her skills are as good as any of the mainstream female rappers out there and her attitude, personality and style, with the right management, will bring her right to the top. This alone makes her an artist worth checking out.

Related Links:
Vanatei Official Website
Vanatei on Twitter
Vanatei on Facebook
Vanatei on SoundCloud.com
Vanatei on YouTube
Vanatei on Myspace

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Screenshot of Vanatei featured on FrostWire minutes after sending out the torrent.

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.

DOWNLOAD ONLY FROM THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE FROSTWIRE.COM

DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR PAY the website “frostwire-software-p2p.com” for FrostWire.

frostwire-software-p2p.com is not affiliated with FrostWire in any way, yet they use our trademarked logo and trademarked name to sell we don’t know what and by asking personal information to users before giving them a FrostWire download.

frostwire-software-p2p.com will try to charge you around $30 a year for a ficticious VIP Access and Supercharge internet connection while putting our name.

We try to go after these sites but they fall out of the jurisdiction of the DMCA in many cases.

Download only from the official website, FrostWire.com, absolutely free, use it all you want, always turbocharged and open sourced.

Selling FrostWire is not illegal or against our software license, in fact one of the freedoms of the GPL license allows others to sell GPLed software, however, using our trademark and pretending to be us to sell our software is a very deceiving practice. Users don’t get the official installer, instead they get installers full of spyware and this damages user’s computers and our reputation.

How to search on FrostWire 5