From Georgia Wonder:
London, UK: Georgia Wonder, an unsigned British band, climbed into the top 20 most shared music in the world last weekend, reaching 14th position in just four days with their debut EP ‘Hello Stranger’.
The EP was put onto the Pirate Bay tracker on Wednesday 14th January and by Saturday 17th was the only music in the top 100 from an unsigned artist. The EP of five songs, which the duo released themselves last year, hit the Pirate Bay Top 20 on Saturday evening and peaked at the 14th position in the early hours of Sunday morning. The Pirate Bay is the worlds largest tracker of shared files.
The band were able to propel their music into well over 50,000 homes across the world in just a few days after making their EP readily available to download from the welcome page of the Limewire software offshoot ‘Frostwire’.
“What Frostwire helped us achieve is incredible” explained Stephanie Grant, vocalist with Georgia Wonder. “Their support has put our music into the hands of tens of thousands of potential fans in a matter of days. 40 billion songs were shared online last year – that’s 6 songs for every person on earth. You can imagine what just five days in the top 20 means to a relatively unknown band like us.”
“We met the Frostwire guys on Twitter” said Julian Moore, the other half of Georgia Wonder. “I’d recently dusted off our Twitter account after hearing that British celebrities such as Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry had become avid users, and after a few weeks we got chatting to the Frostwire team. They were really keen to let us try their new approach to band promotion and as we were already letting people share our music on Twitter we agreed to give it a shot. I’m so glad we did!’
Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker has repelled many unsuccessful attempts to shut it down over the last few years including a police raid in 2006 and bitter disputes with a variety of music and media companies in 2007. “It’s easy to forget that while the major record labels and anti-copyright groups have been taking high-profile shots at each other there are a lot of independent artists out here who are simply trying to navigate their way through the wreckage” said Julian. “Our success with Frostwire proves that you can cut through the argument and chart your own course.”
About Georgia Wonder
Georgia Wonder played in front of over 14,000 people for Simply Red frontman Mick Hucknall on his UK tour and performed at an historic election night at the London American Embassy alongside Glenn Tilbrook from Squeeze. Their song ‘Girl You Never Knew’ from their debut EP ‘Hello Stranger’ has been on rotation on Bliss TV for six months and has received plaudits from Record Of The Day and Pop Justice who called it ‘..one Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack appearance away from being an international hit single.’ They were recently nominated for an interactive award at Eurosonic and won best video in the rock category on OurStage.com in November ’08 for their song ‘Would Love To Meet’. Originally picked up by legendary BBC presenter ‘whispering’ Bob Harris who played their demos for two concurrent weeks on his BBC Radio 2 show, they have performed live on BBC Southern Counties, BBC Radio Solent, Original FM and a host of other regional radio stations.
–ENDS–
Contact
Julian Moore
julian at gwonder dot com
References
Pirate Bay Snapshot 18/1/09
40 Billion Songs Shared Online
Links
Georgia Wonder Website
Frostwire
‘Hello Stranger’ EP Torrent on Pirate Bay
Reviews
Record Of The Day
Record Of The Day – Record Of The Week
Pop Justice – Song Of The Day
