News

Thom Yorke To Release Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes Via Bit Torrent

• 26th Sep 2014

Radiohead man Thom Yorke has rather smugly announced that as an experiment he will be using a new version of BitTorrent to distribute his latest record ‘Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’.

Update: the album is now available for download really annoyingly only using BitTorrent here.

In a fairly patronising statement he says:

“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”

We’re not particularly sure why Yorke thinks this is so groundbreaking or why people would pay for music using a Torrent service when the music would supposedly be freely available to pay for on any other digital store.

The whole thing smells a bit like a big Aphex Twin-shaped posturing gimmick to us.

“My nu-tech deep web marketing is more meta than yours” anybody?