For many people BitTorrent is synonymous with piracy, but the popular file-sharing technology has much more to offer. Over the past year BitTorrent Inc. has intensified its efforts to help artists reach millions of new fans, and not without result. A bundle of tracks from Moby's latest album Innocents, which can be downloaded for free and completely legally, is the most-shared torrent of 2013 with an impressive 8.9 million downloads.

Earlier today we published a list of the top 20 most-pirated artists. With well over 5 million downloads this chart was topped by Bruno Mars. Interestingly enough, the honor of the most-downloaded artist on BitTorrent goes to a legal download.

BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the immensely popular file-sharing client uTorrent, has just released an overview detailing the successes of its “bundles” program alongside a list of the most-downloaded legal content.

The company regularly teams up with artists to release free content. One of the top stars last year was Moby, who shared several tracks from his 11th studio album ‘Innocents’ for free via the popular file-sharing platform.

According to BitTorrent Inc., this bundle with free tracks was the most-shared torrent of 2013, with a staggering 8.9 million downloads. Not a big surprise, as more than 85,000 people are still actively sharing the tracks at the time of writing.

The second most-shared bundle is the Epic Meal Time video bundle with 8.6 million downloads, followed by Kaskade’s tracks with 4.1 million downloads.

The secret behind BitTorrent’s bundle program is that the torrents are included with every download of the uTorrent and BitTorrent mainline applications. Since these clients are installed by dozens of millions of people, the numbers add up quickly.

“164,383 BitTorrent Bundles are downloaded around the world, every day. These projects have been downloaded 60 million times, by fans in over 170 countries around the world,” BitTorrent Inc. notes.

Bragging rights aside, the downloads also bring value to the artists in question. They are able to reach millions of new fans which may eventually boosts concert visits and sales.

Moby, for example, managed to add 419,000 people to his email list via the bundle. In addition, 130,000 people clicked through to the iTunes store while 68,000 new remixes of his tracks were created.

That can be considered quite a success.

The top 20 most-downloaded bundles are listed below. More stats and background information on the program is available in the 2013 BitTorrent report.