In modern day and age, the moment you hear the words ‘music torrent tracker’, you automatically attribute them with illegal downloads which infringe copyright. While most of the torrent sites out there do enable sharing of copyrighted material, the BitTorrent technology can be put to legal uses as well. Panda.CD is a new private torrent tracker that demonstrates a legit use of BitTorrent – not only does the site encourage uploading legal music, but it also has a model where users can directly donate to artists as an appreciation of their work. Just like a regular music tracker, Panda.CD indexes MP3 and FLAC tracks of music related to a number of different genres. However, these files are either uploaded by artists themselves or are licensed under sharing friendly schemes such as Creative Commons. If you are interested in joining this unique tracker, signups are currently open.

Panda is a brand new torrent site and has only been online for a couple of days. It currently tracks around 160 torrents and has ~200 registered members. As mentioned earlier, PCD encourages artists to share their original music to be distributed over BitTorrent. The site has a unique ‘artist donations’ feature through which users can directly donate to artists as a reward for their efforts. More on how this feature works is quoted below:

Whenever you upload a torrent if you are the artist in question or you are an official representative, you have the option to enter your PayPal details and an (optional) donation target (which is total sum on donations that you would like to achieve). This will appear on the details page of the torrent, allowing other site members to donate directly to you for your torrents if they so wish.

Once a donation target has been reached on a torrent it will thereby be made freeleech for 1 week. Setting your donation info on your ‘edit’ page will also add a PayPal button to your profile. If you are the artist responsible for any of the torrents already uploaded here by another member please contact us to claim ownership and enable artist donations.

But of course, non-artist members can still upload freely available music. So don’t let that stop you.

We envision the site as being one where artists can come together to share their work, while members directly support the creation of new music.

Making an artist donation for a torrent you like is pretty easy – just click on the green star that appears next to the torrent name on main index.

So, can only artists upload torrents to Panda.CD? Are only legal uploads allowed here? We contacted the site’s owner for further clarification:

Yeah only legal uploads are allowed. Any music can be uploaded as long as the licence permits it. So while this means that the site is more geared towards bands/artists releasing their own music, members could still potentially make their own rips of music that allows sharing (eg. existing creative commons music). Only the artist themselves, or an official representative may receive artist donations for a torrent.

It may be a new site but the concept behind Panda.CD is very interesting. If this kicks off, it could put to rest a lot of “BitTorrent is evil” myths out there. For those interested in joiing, signups are currently open.

Site Name: Panda.CD (http://panda.cd)

Signup URL: http://panda.cd/index.php?p=signup

Special thanks to Dave (PCD Owner) for the heads up.