Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke releases album as a BitTorrent Bundle

[Heisenbleurgh]

I stumbled into this as Radiohead is one of my favorite bands. A couple years ago the band tried something new, where they wanted to skip any record labels by writing, recording and distributing their album themselves, where you could pay any amount you wanted for it including absolutely nothing.

Last week, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke tried to shake up the music industry again by deciding to release an album with no previous announcement as a BitTorrent bundle. Although this time the album isn't free, he listed the well known benefits of torrents as reason to distribute the album this way, and I hope this might get others, music industry or not, interested in it.

 

"As an experiment we are using a new version of BitTorrent to distribute a new Thom Yorke record.

The new Torrent files have a pay gate to access a bundle of files..

The files can be anything, but in this case is an ‘album’.

It’s an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around …

If it works well it could be an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work.

Enabling those people who make either music, video or any other kind of digital content to sell it themselves.

Bypassing the self elected gate-keepers.

If it works anyone can do this exactly as we have done.

The torrent mechanism does not require any server uploading or hosting costs or ‘cloud’ malarkey.

It’s a self-contained embeddable shop front…

The network not only carries the traffic, it also hosts the file. The file is in the network.

Oh yes and it’s called

Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes."

 

Thom Yorke & Nigel Godrich

 

I think this idea benefits a lot of indie artists and content creators and could be implemented by bands, directors, game developers and others that want to release artistic content without having to compromise artistic decisions because of business men. At the same time it can help to remove the bad image associated with using torrents.

 

source

[Builder]

Certainly very interesting. I'm always excited to see innovative legal ways of using BitTorrent technology.

[aom]

Hurrah for Bittorrent. Removes the middle man from it,so Artists can do whatever they want without the restrictions of a record label.

But then again, this "pay gate" will just be circumvented since you could just go to PirateBay and download the "free" illegal version.

 

I listen to mostly J-Pop and Vocaloid songs (even I don't know why, but I like it), so it won't really matter to me (unless BitTorrent is a thing in Japan, would think they have their own similar programs)

[iwasaperson]

Hurrah for Bittorrent. Removes the middle man from it,so Artists can do whatever they want without the restrictions of a record label.

But then again, this "pay gate" will just be circumvented since you could just go to PirateBay and download the "free" illegal version.

 

I listen to mostly J-Pop and Vocaloid songs (even I don't know why, but I like it), so it won't really matter to me (unless BitTorrent is a thing in Japan, would think they have their own similar programs)

Yeah, but one of the reasons people pirate is because there is no convenient way of legally getting the product, ie UPlay, music DRM, etc.

[othertomperson]

The industry utilising torrents as a legitimate source of business and not just litigating? Well it would be Radiohead, wouldn't it?

[aom]

Yeah, but one of the reasons people pirate is because there is no convenient way of legally getting the product, ie UPlay, music DRM, etc.

But also the large percent that simply are too lazy and cheap to support the artist, developers, etc.

And to be honest, I was like at before I got a job/old enough to be able to get a job because I wanted stuff, but too cheap with my meager allowance to buy it. 

 

Derp Minecraft (bought it afterwards, but then was already getting boring)

[BallGum]

Woo Radiohead. Though I mostly listen to metal these days_ I've always loved their Ok Computer Album.

[Builder]

Yeah, but one of the reasons people pirate is because there is no convenient way of legally getting the product, ie UPlay, music DRM, etc.

iTunes, Spotify, any number of other streaming services...you can get unlimited music on Spotify for $9.99/month and download all of it that you want. Other services have other value-adds, like Beats Music has great discoverability services.

 

Spotify is to music what Steam was to gaming.

 

Saying it's inconvenient to get music these days is just avoiding the question of why you don't want to pay for it in the first place, period.

[Electrostatik]

C'mon Thom, can't I just stream it?

[othertomperson]

iTunes, Spotify, any number of other streaming services...you can get unlimited music on Spotify for $9.99/month and download all of it that you want. Other services have other value-adds, like Beats Music has great discoverability services.

 

Spotify is to music what Steam was to gaming.

 

Saying it's inconvenient to get music these days is just avoiding the question of why you don't want to pay for it in the first place, period.

 

All of those things rely on server availability and a corporation willing to fund it, or charge the end user for it in addition to the music. It's about time the industry embraced torrenting as a legitimate method of moving data instead of what they've previously been doing.

[razor767]

Will be interesting to see how this plays out, still wish it was available to stream though.