Everybody knows about it by now, Thom Yorke has dropped a new album via BitTorrent on Friday, just in time for the weekend…. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I guess the delivery will surpass the album itself. BitTorrent? I said to myself on Friday morning, isn’t it the piracy site, the forbidden site for people with some ethics who still pay for album downloads?
Not anymore, and this may be the genius part of the release. Google anything, any album, and you will find a way to download it via BitTorrent, for free, whereas you can download Thom Yorke’s new album via BitTorrent through a paygate.
As Thom himself said it, it’s an experiment
‘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.’
So you can have the eight tracks of ‘Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’ plus a video, for only $6… Actually when I got the news early this morning, I thought he was releasing it for free, and I was surprised to see the $6, not that it is a problem, but it’s a bit surprising to see Yorke going back to a fixed price when he has experimented the pay-what-you-want before. It’s also innovative that he is taking possession of a medium associated with piracy to make money… or recompensing the pirate medium, knowing that BiTorrent will receive 10% of the overall revenue after transaction costs. Oh sure some pirated version have already popped up – I even stumbled on one of them without even looking for it – but this is an innovative process, and according to NME, 34,900 people have downloaded the album in the first 2 hours of its release…
‘If it works anyone can do this exactly as we have done.’ Yorke and Nigel Godrich continued in the press release
‘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.’
I found the move much more clever than the recent U2’s release on iTunes, which even irritated many people, at this level Thom Yorke is the anti Bono.
BitTorrent boss Matt Mason spoke to NME about the surprising release while mentioning the U2 experience:
‘The biggest innovation in music this year so far has been Apple releasing a tool to remove a U2 album from your iTunes. It’s been a bad year for music innovation. The way major labels just throw all their music on Spotify, they’ve given up on selling people music. We hope to prove with this and our work with other artists – we’ve worked with Madonna, Linkin Park as well as lots of rising names – that there’s another way.’
Wasn’t Bono just talking about a new way to save the music industry? I guess he has just been beaten out.
Iman adds: It isn’t the bittorrant download, it is $6 for an album by Thom Yorke. As I’ve written relentlessly for months and months, the problem with mp3s isn’t streaming taking their bucks, it’s the price.
