The Pirate Bay has stopped promoting artists on its frontpage due to recent "personnel" changes. The initiative, which generated worldwide attention for independent musicians and writers, has been put on hold for now. According to one of the site's co-founders, the recent developments are yet another sign that the largest file-sharing site on the Internet is going stale, but the Pirate Bay crew disagrees.

In this day and age aspiring artists have access to all the tools they need to create a decent product.

The real challenge is to escape obscurity and get noticed by the public.

To help artists get noticed, The Pirate Bay rolled out a new promotion platform last year. Through The Promo Bay the site offered artists a prime advertising spot on the site’s homepage, replacing the iconic logo, for free.

In the weeks that followed more than 10,000 artists signed up for a feature, nearly all musicians. A few dozens of these have been promoted over the past year, generating millions of page views and in some cases even a healthy stream of revenue.

But despite these successes The Promo Bay hasn’t been featuring any new artists in recent weeks.

Tobias Andersson, one of the original founders of The Pirate Bay who came up with the idea for the promotion platform, has left the ship and at the moment there is no-one around to take his place.

Will Dayble, who manages the separate Promo Bay site, hasn’t been in touch with The Pirate Bay crew but stresses that the site will remain online. Artists can still submit their content to the site, and Dayble hopes that TPB or another site will soon help out on the promotion side again.

Tobias Andersson told TorrentFreak that he is indeed moving on with other things, and he isn’t holding back on his criticism of the current Pirate Bay crew either.

“The Pirate Bay not continuing with The Promo Bay is just more evidence of the site going stale. It’s not the rebellious, energetic and progressive site it once was. It’s bloated with ads, more than ever, worse than ever. Nothing is said, nothing is done,” Andersson says.

Despite being the largest file-sharing site on the Internet, Andersson believes that The Pirate Bay has lost its edge in recent years.

“It’s just another site. Which is sad since it once was something completely different. It didn’t used to be just a site, it was a concept of a better Internet. Sure, most people only want the site for Hollywood movies and mainstream music. But any site could do that. There are hundreds of sites like that.”

The Pirate Bay crew disagrees with Andersson and says that the Promo Bay initiative isn’t dead yet. They will try to find someone to handle the artist contacts and get the project running again in the future.

Andersson nonetheless reiterates what he said before, that closing down the site may be the best option.

“I see no value in TPB continuing. The best thing would be if it shut down now, to mark ten years of resistance, resiliency and a stance for the free Internet,” he says.

The Pirate Bay, however, shows no sign of stopping. Despite heavy criticism from several of its founders, the site keeps expanding its user base month after month while continuing the development of several anti-censorship tools.