The Counting Crows released their new album Underwater Sunshine three weeks ago, but today they also partnered with BitTorrent to release a free bundle of new tracks, liner notes and artwork as a way of accessing a broader fanbase.

The Counting Crows left their record label in 2009. At the time, frontman Adam Duritz said that the label simply wasn’t equipped to let them play with the internet in the way that they wanted.

BitTorrent users are 31% more likely to purchase digital singles and 100% more likely to pay for a music subscription service.

The company has developed a technology which allows them to attack existing BitTorrent swarms, making it impossible for people to share files.

“We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every P2P client that distributed this film. Then Pirate Pay sent specific traffic to confuse these clients about the real IP-addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other,” Andrei Klimenko says.

Pirate Pay don’t disclose their exact rates but say they charge between $12,000 and $50,000 depending on the scope of the project.

Despite the industry's readiness to insist that copyright infringement threatens the future of musicians - especially those who are lesser known - there are plenty of examples where the opposite is true.

Now, thanks to the High Court ruling, no aspiring musician will be able to use The Promo Bay to gain exposure in the UK. Once again, the British Phonographic Industry is throttling any channel of distribution which doesn't allow them the cut to which they believe they are entitled. I'd like to see what the BPI's head, Geoff Taylor, has to say to George Barnett, the unsigned British songwriter whose fanbase skyrocketed after being featured on The Promo Bay. The only thing that the BPI has done for George is to entirely prohibit his primary means of exposure.

Countering claims from the movie industry that Hotfile has few non-infringing uses, the Professor shows that the most downloaded files on the cyberlocker are Open Source software.

While the MPAA and others claim that affiliate programs which compensate users for generating downloads are solely setup to promote infringements, several software developers actually use them to generate revenue from their free programs.

“This suggests that the Hotfile Affiliate program is capable of fulfilling the valuable function of compensating authors and distributors,” Boyle adds.

The cyberlocker is working out a deal with the Department of Justice to allow users to download their personal files. Interestingly enough, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom reveals that these users include many high-ranking US Government officials.

Over the past weeks Megaupload has been looking into the various options they have to grant users temporary access. Interestingly enough, this quest revealed that many accounts are held by US Government officials.

“Guess what – we found a large number of Mega accounts from US Government officials including the Department of Justice and the US Senate.”

While many BitTorrent sites and cyberlockers continue to operate as usual, there is a growing group of users who are expanding their horizons to see what other means of sharing are available if the worst case scenario becomes reality.

There are more file-sharing tools that are specifically built to withstand outside attacks. Some even add anonymity into the mix. RetroShare is such a private and uncensored file-sharing client, and the developers have also noticed a significant boom in users recently.

In other words, it’s a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders.

Several theories have been circulating, mainly focusing on the file-hoster trying to drive users to take up premium accounts. But according to RapidShare the reason is simple – to drive pirates away from their service.

“RapidShare has been faced with a severe increase in free user traffic and unfortunately also in the amount of abuse of our service ever since, suggesting that quite a few copyright infringers have chosen RapidShare as their new hoster of choice for their illegal activities,” the company explained.

The content industries, both film and music, have been taking a noticeably tougher line on pirates in recent months as they continue to lose profits because of those determined to get content free.

The site has already spawned political parties in Sweden and the UK and maintains a loyal fanbase who seem more than prepared to go the extra mile in order to carry on getting content for free.

So, did shutting down MegaUpload cut a big chunk out of the flow of illegal files as pro-SOPA advocates predicted?

No, but the distribution pattern has changed.

Jan. 18, the day of the raid, MegaUpload's MegaVideo was the biggest supplier of video online, with 34.1 percent of all traffic. Its closest competitor was Filesonic with 19.1 percent.

On Jan. 19, the day after MegaUpload went away and Filesonic swore off third-party downloads, Putlocker was the No. 1 source with 27.5 percent of all downloads. NovaMov and MediaFire follow, with less than half that market share.

So "instead of terabytes of North America MegaUpload traffic going to US servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over far more expensive transatlantic links," according to Deepfield.

The Pirate Bay team have just released a new platform where artists can have their content promoted on the site’s homepage, free of charge.

Artists who want to participate have to offer something free in return, so a link to the iTunes store wont work, but apart from that pretty much anything goes. The promos can be targeted to a maximum of 3 countries, but if an artist manages to impress the Pirate Bay team, they may choose to promote it worldwide.