The mixtape has come a long way from being sold on street corners and out of the trunk of the family car to the Internet warehouses of Datpiff and LiveMixtapes. But now, with the help of another platform that has gone through its own set of changes—one of the formerly derided scourges of the record industry, BitTorrent—mixtapes as we know them may soon become obsolete; or, at the very least, completely different.

Last year, BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer community that allows for the transfer of large files without the need for a central server, announced that they were partnering with Curren$y's Jet Life label to put out their next series of mixtapes as individual bundles, or packages that have the ability to deliver more than just music. Jet Life's first release, the label compilation Red Eye, last August, included 13 tracks as well as a tour poster, a music video, a coupon for free merchandise at the crew's next show and the entrance to a competition that would grant one fan the "Ultimate Jet Life Experience," delivering more than just the music to the more than four million fans who downloaded the bundle in its first two months.

Since then, hip-hop has slowly started to gravitate towards the medium, with vets like Public Enemy, Cam'ron and De La Soul, younger artists such as G-Eazy, Ace Hood and Pell and other labels such as Fool's Gold all testing out BitTorrent's capabilities. "We wanted to come up with something different for publishers and creators to go to get directly to fans," says Matt Mason, Chief Content Officer at BitTorrent. "And when you're talking to the average artist or manager about the information they get back from anyone—whether it's Netflix or iTunes or streaming services like Deezer or Spotify—people don't feel like they're getting enough. They don't understand their fans and they're being intentionally blocked from connecting with them. And without their fans, artists don't have anything."

The music business has shifted into an era where artists don't always need a traditional record label structure to be successful, and as the barriers between fans and artists continue to be chipped away, BitTorrent is attempting to come in and build an effective bridge between artists who need to make a living and fans who are willing to support them, while largely staying out of the way. It's almost an artist-sanctioned return to the Napster era, when BitTorrent first started to gain notoriety, except instead of promoting a Wild West-type Internet where everything is free and available to anyone who knew where to look, this time BitTorrent is partnering with artists directly to corral fans and build an artist's influence, rather than take away from their ends.

So, what the hell actually are these bundles, and how do they work? XXL spoke to a series of people—both BitTorrent execs and artists themselves—to break down how and why these bundles are becoming so successful, and why they might change the landscape of hip-hop forever. Things done changed. —Dan Rys 

How Bundles Work

Curren$y/Jet Life | De La Soul

G-Eazy | Ace Hood | Fool's Gold Records

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How do bundles work?

BitTorrent's bundles are basically downloadable folders that contain a series of files with no limit as to how big they can be. But the key here is that, unlike Dropbox or even the Cloud, there's no central server that carries everything, and no way for the content to crash or disappear. The easiest way to think about it is to think back to the Napster days, or using any torrent, really: instead of downloading from one central place, the user is downloading from many other users who all have the same content, pulling bits and pieces from each. That allows for a more democratic, if you will, download process for fans. "We wanted to build a service where artists could connect directly with fans and, as much as possible, BitTorrent could just get out of the way," Mason explains. "With a bundle, you can put literally anything in there, and we can ship it to hundreds of millions of people faster than anyone else, doesn't matter the file size. The options are really open."

With bundles that are fully customizable, artists can incorporate any kind of cross-branding and promotion they can think of within each package, and try to engage their fans in as many ways as possible. That can come as simply as requiring an email address in order to download a bundle—growing an email list can drive merchandise and ticket sales if done correctly—or with more advanced tiers within each particular bundle, as well. Mason says that by the end of the year, BitTorrent will introduce two new concepts into their bundles—a pay gate and a threshold gate, behind which artists can hide more music, videos, posters or other content for their fans. A pay gate, which is supposed to come in September, would allow fans to buy merchandise or music within the bundle itself. Going off that, a threshold gate could be built in, where a further package of material would be unlocked if a certain number of fans downloaded the bundle or purchased an item within it. A single bundle could be its own multi-tiered marketing push that would keep morphing and unlocking for weeks at a time.

"You could put a free mixtape in a bundle, you could put an album behind the pay gate—say it's $5 or $8 to get the album—and then you could have a second gate, which would be the threshold gate, which says that when this bundle hits $100,000 in sales, that second gate will open and everybody who paid $5 for the album will get a bonus piece of content," Mason explains. "What that does is encourage fans to share this content even more, and to get their friends to share and unlock the album... Digital marketing is the biggest problem for people. What we're trying to do is to make that as [easy] as possible, helping you understand the right strategy given your audience, where they are and how you monetize. That's what we're focused on."

So, how are people using these bundles? For one, Cam'ron released the initial installment of his 1st Of The Month series using the platform, largely to build awareness with a new type of release. But then there's Public Enemy, who used BitTorrent to run a remix competition asking fans to take the stems of PE track and remix it; the group then selected their favorites and released the remix package for sale on iTunes. But those are just two small examples.

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Jet Life

Initial Bundle Release Date: Aug. 2, 2013
Downloads To Date: 4 million+ (as of October 2013)
Included In Bundle: Instant: Red Eye Tour poster, Red Eye single "Right Now"; Unlocked: Red Eye mixtape, music video, Jet Life merch coupon, Entrance to win Ultimate Jet Life Experience package
Additional Bundles: Curren$y, The Drive-In Theatre; Young Roddy, Bales; Mary Gold, Sex Hormone'd Druggie

The Pitch: As the first major hip-hop partnership, BitTorrent's deal with Curren$y and Jet Life was a litmus test of sorts to see how the platform would mesh within the hip-hop world. Austin Briggs, then the Digital Marketing Strategist at Jet Life, now a Content Strategist at BitTorrent, put the project together in a way that the BitTorrent team hadn't seen before.

"The limitation that other distribution outlets have is that there's no way to connect the other elements of your business through that release," he says. "If you're releasing a mixtape on Datpiff or you're putting out an album on iTunes, you have to send them your content and then you have to somehow drive these users back to your website, or to your Songkick page, or to your YouTube page to consume the other content. Every time you make that step, you lose a significant amount of those users along the way.

"One of the things that we did with the first Jet Life bundle that was successful was we created a .jpg that fans could print out at home after unlocking a bundle. And they could take that printout and come to a show on the Red Eye Tour, come to the merch table and submit that paper and get two free lighters from that merch table on any of those tour dates. And we saw between five and 10 percent of the audience every night coming to the merch table with that piece of paper. To be able to connect the merch table to a digital release? I mean, as someone coming from the artist side before coming over to BitTorrent, that's astounding. I don't know of another platform where you're able to do such a thing.

"Pretty Lights was the case study that I saw. And just comparing the audience; Pretty Lights is an artist that's always distributed his music directly to his fans, focusing on significant touring to build with and connect with that audience and to stay involved with that audience, and then focused on touring revenue and merchandising revenue to drive the business. And that's the Jet Life model. 'Cause it never had—it's started to change now—but coming up in 2009, 2010, there were no radio singles, it was all word of mouth, kids telling their friends that you should listen to this record, that you should go to this show, and the audience just grew. And to see the response that Pretty Lights had with that first initial bundle release that he did, I could just see the correlation with our audience, and that audience definitely panned out and turned out to be correct."

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De La Soul

Bundle Release Date: Mar. 26, 2014
Downloads To Date: N/A
Included In Bundle: 11-track Smell The Da.I.S.Y. J Dilla mixtape, audio letter, wallpaper, J Dilla documentary Still Shinning, Easter Egg hunt clues for pressed vinyl editions of Smell The Da.I.S.Y. instrumentals

The Pitch: For De La Soul, it was all about J Dilla. The group's Smell The Da.I.S.Y. tape included Dilla instrumentals remixed with De La a capellas to create a brand new mixtape of songs, which they then packaged alongside an audio letter and a Dilla documentary for their fans earlier this year. But the real victory for the New York trio came after the release of the tape; in order to download Da.I.S.Y., fans only had to give up their email address, and a week later a scavenger hunt appeared in the inbox of everyone who copped the tape.

"Earlier in the year [on Valentine's Day], they put their entire back catalog up for 24 hours on Dropbox, [and] Dropbox broke almost instantly," Mason says; after the failure of Dropbox's servers, BitTorrent got in touch. "They had this whole crazy, really well-thought-out strategy, and it was very much an experiment for them in how much interest they can generate in physical goods. They wanted to see how they could create interest with physical goods in the real world."

"For us, just to find different viable options in putting our music out was really important to us," says Dave from De La Soul. "You know, it's one of those things where we, on a technical end, did not know what we were doing when we were doing the Valentine's Day release, so to know that there was an option out there that would work—not only for us in getting it out there, but that could make it easier for the fans in giving stuff away for free so that they would have no problem at all—just finding those options was definitely important for us."

After the Valentine's Day release, De La turned to the next holiday—Easter—and worked their new strategy around that. "We did the vinyl releases as an egg hunt, a record hunt for Easter, and released 100 copies of the instrumental of the mixtape," Dave says; the group planted the copies at record stores around the world, then emailed fans clues and uploaded hints to the Yelp pages of record stores to help guide their path. "That was well-received as well. People really appreciated the specialty vinyl."

"The thing they were really interested in was how quickly these records got picked up, and then how quickly they changed hands afterwards," Mason says. "And what they saw was, all of them were gone worldwide the day they released them, as you'd expect, but then they were being sold on eBay immediately afterward for anywhere from $700 to $1,500 dollars. It soon became a really valuable physical good."

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G-Eazy

Bundle Release Date: June 5, 2014
Downloads To Date: 1.3 million+
Included In Bundle: Instant: These Things Happen album sampler, album art, Must Be Nice free album, Endless Summer mixtape, photo collection, bonus track; Unlocked: posters, B-Sides tracks, "Rare" mixtape tracks and extra, two unreleased bonus tracks, "Loaded" music video, remix album Must Be Twice

The Pitch: As G-Eazy geared up to drop his debut retail LP, These Things Happen, out June 21, he decided to clear the decks of his back catalog and provide his fans—as well as anyone else interested in his music—with everything he'd released up until that point, tossing in an album teaser, a remix project and a series of posters, photos and other artwork as well. "It was an idea that felt like an instant yes, just because it's in line with everything we've done in the past in terms of giving music away and the whole philosophy behind it," G-Eazy says. "Giving music away for free is like getting people into a funnel, and if you can keep them there and they can follow the career and the music, then ultimately they can become a fan who would buy a ticket to a show, or buy a CD or buy a t-shirt or something. And the whole BitTorrent thing was a way to get a million people into that funnel instantly and to catch them up to speed, and you get the whole story right then and there with everything in the whole pack."

For G, it wasn't so much about giving everything away as it was about packaging everything together in one place as a type of starter kit for fans new and old. "We just wanted to put as much in there as we can, from the music to the photographers on every tour to just capture this crazy lifestyle that we live and everything that's going on, and there's a lot of music in the back catalog," he says. "And we wanted to put as much stuff into the bundle as possible so that it was something more special than just downloading a mixtape. Like, you actually got a ton of shit.

"The thing is, we live in an era where content is free and there's a lot of it and it's just all about reaching people. You never wanna make something and then not be heard. You never want your music to fall on deaf ears. Everybody who makes shit wants to be heard, and it's really just about how to reach the most people and how to be the loudest. And BitTorrent is a platform for that."

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Ace Hood

Bundle Release Date: July 11, 2014
Downloads To Date: 1.3 million+
Included In Bundle: 22-track Best Of Starvation mixtape, eight music videos, bonus track, exclusive artwork, photo set, wallpaper, mech store discount, "Everyday" contest with open verse

The Pitch: Ace Hood's Starvation mixtape series has been going strong for the past three years, and after releasing the third installment this January, the "Bugatti" rapper wanted to commemorate the series in a new way. To do that, he create a Best Of Starvation package, with a curated lineup of the best tracks on all three tapes, a slew of music videos and a couple of other perks for fans tossed in. But that wasn't everything.

"What really took it over the edge was that Ace took the track 'Everyday' and opened up the third verse and was offering fans to enter their email to unlock the track," Briggs says. "Fans could then take that track into their home studio, cut their own verse and then upload that remix to a Soundcloud that Ace Hood's camp is running, and then next month he's going to go through all the remixes and highlight his favorite artists on his Soundcloud page and on his social media. If that goes somewhere from there, whether it's because he's blown away, that'd be wonderful. But that's the kind of interaction that you can create with bundle if you're looking to create the type of package that goes above and beyond the box that you have to fit in with iTunes and with Spotify."

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Fool's Gold

Bundle Release Date: July 31, 2014
Downloads To Date: 900,000+
Included In Bundle: 8-track compilation of new artists, digital booklet, wallpaper, new artist trading cards, Fool's Gold store discount

The Pitch: Fool's Gold, the brainchild of co-founders Nick Catchdubs and A-Trak, used BitTorrent to unveil a slew of new additions to their roster, and focused their bundle on introducing their new artists in a way that was both innovative and in line with the Fool's Gold brand. The compilation, called Draft Picks, followed the theme of basketball rookies, complete with trading cards and a track from each new artist on the label—and a stick of gum. But they also wanted to go the BitTorrent route in order to separate the project from the stigma, as it were, of a traditional mixtape release.

"When we had the idea to do the Draft Picks release, we wanted to introduce this new crop of artists and give away music from each of them, but present it like it was an album, present it in a cool way," Catchdubs says. "There's a million ways to give away music; for us it was more about having this cool multi-media presentation where the art and the package of it would get across, and the vibe could be presented exactly as we wanted it to... If you have a paintbrush, it doesn't make a difference unless you have a vision for what you want to paint. And for us, the idea always comes first. The idea always trumps the technology. This just happens to be a great case where we had a download partner who was down to be as creative as we were. But it all kind of stems from the idea of presenting this new roster of Fool's Gold artists.

"The reason we wanted to use BitTorrent for this was because we didn't want people to feel like Draft Picks was a mixtape," he says. "It's not a traditional album, it's not a traditional mixtape, it's a brand new thing. It's sui generis; we wanted it to be this cool Fool's Gold project that you're not seeing another label flip it like we do. And the cool thing about BitTorrent was that BitTorrent as a company has that same X-Factor. They can do projects like this that don't come with these preconceived notions or that don't come with this extra baggage. It's a tool that let us present something in a new way and have a feel of novelty to it."

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