Photo: WENN
On Friday afternoon, BitTorrent ushered Thom Yorke’s surprise new album ’Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’ onto the internet.
The album was a first for the service, as it was their first pay gated music bundle with a potential new distribution model for artists who want to take control over file-sharing.
The company’s Chief Content Officer, Matt Mason, spoke to The Fader about the Radiohead star’s release and what he hopes can come out of this experiment.
Mason revealed that the idea of the BitTorrent bundle was in fact inspired by Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want model for their seventh album ‘In Rainbows’ and said: “It’s just been the absolute gold standard for how to do something direct-to-fan on the internet.”
When the BitTorrent executive was introduced to Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich through Radiohead’s manager, the album was not completedy. Mason explained "I don’t know if Thom would have made the album anyway, but he wasn’t planning on making a new album when we started talking to them. The idea of releasing something came out of the conversations that we had, which was, for us, incredibly humbling that they believed in this technology to the extent of actually making something especially for it.”
Sizing up the competition, Mason went onto say that he believes BitTorrent offers more over similar companies such as Bandcamp. “Bandcamp’s great, they’ve done a fantastic job and I would never discourage anyone from putting anything on Bandcamp, but the difference between BitTorrent and every other direct-to-fan service is [that] we have a truly global audience that we can put Bundles in front of.”
Indeed, BitTorrent’s audience is vast. The service reaches 170 million people each month, making it an audience larger than twice the combined audience of Spotify, Netflix, Hulu and BandCamp.
At the time of writing, Yorke’s second solo LP has already been downloaded approximately 186,000 times from the service since its release on Friday.
