While the major record labels and movie studios do what they can to shutter The Pirate Bay, thousands of lesser known artists are eager to become featured on the site's homepage. Since the start of the "Promo Bay" initiative in January, 10,000 independent artists have signed up to be promoted by the world’s largest torrent site. Those who were lucky enough to be featured have enjoyed a healthy career boost and in some cases earned thousands of dollars from file-sharing fans..

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. Previously, this was a task the major record labels and other media distributors fulfilled, but from this year they have a worthy opponent.

At the beginning of 2012 The Pirate Bay rolled out The Promo Bay, a new promotion platform for filmmakers, musicians, writers and all other artists alike. To help them reach an audience of tens of millions of people, The Pirate Bay started offering the artists a prime advertising spot on the site’s homepage, replacing the iconic pirate ship logo.

Best-selling author and Pirate Bay supporter Paulo Coelho had the honor of kicking off the project and in the months that followed 25 artists were featured worldwide. In addition, The Pirate Bay also ran many regional promotions.

“The featured artists got thousands of new fans on their Facebook pages and their content was downloaded or played numerous times. For example, Soso got over 100,000 views on her music video during the 72 hours it was featured,” The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak.

Even better perhaps, the promotions also resulted in hard cash for some.

McPixel designer Sos Sosowski, for example, decided to feature his game on The Pirate Bay frontpage which resulted in 3,055 purchases worth $7,824.69 in revenue. Certainly not a bad result for a weekend promotion.

Thus far the Promo Bay has been a great success, so much so that The Pirate Bay team can’t keep up with all the requests. “We have about 10,000 submissions in our inbox, with about 2000 unread,” they say.

Arrr

To become more organized the BitTorrent site has called in the help of Aussie entrepreneur Will Dayble who is currently working on a separate website for the Promo Bay.

“Since the workload is way too high for us to cope with, we’ve asked our new-found friend Will in Australia for help. He and his friends built promobay.org, a site where all the artists will be able to submit their stuff in the future.”

The new site is still work in progress, but once it goes live the public will get a vote in what artists will be featured.

“We’re hoping that once we get that to work, we’ll be able to let the audience vote for a promo each week. We’ll still have the right to veto though, so there will be no Justin Bieber on our front page.”

While the Pirate Bay can’t complain about the volume of artists submissions, they would prefer to have a bit more variety. At the moment 90% of all submissions are music related, and only 5% of these are female artists or groups.

“The typical submission is an American or Swedish male indie pop group. German people on the other hand love bad dubstep,” The Pirate Bay says.

While The Pirate Bay may offer promotion services equivalent to that of a “record label,” there’s also a big difference. The BitTorrent site doesn’t ask for a cut of the proceeds and gets its satisfaction from helping to spread great content.

“We do this for fun and for the love of culture, so we’re everything the major labels are not,” they say.

Artists who are interested in becoming featured are welcome to apply, but due to the overwhelming response getting signed with a major record label might be easier.