Back in 2007, Radiohead shocked the music business by releasing a critically acclaimed album online with a pay-what-you-want pricing model. Not long after, the website Bandcamp allowed lesser-known artists to put their music into the vast expanse of the Internet, even if it didn’t make much — or any — money. Beyoncé can drop an album with full music videos without warning, and for better or worse (read: worse), U2 can give you their newest album whether you want it or not.
The ever-changing world of music distribution and downloading is a common topic addressed by music critics, especially in our Spotify-ruled world. It seems as though there aren’t any more ways for artists to innovately release albums. Until, of course, this past Friday, when Thom Yorke, lead singer of the aforementioned Radiohead, genuinely managed to blow minds by dropping an entire album onto a site known in some circles for promoting music piracy.
Last week, Yorke dropped a few hints that he might be in the studio. Rumors swirled about a potential new Radiohead album — the most recent was 2011’s The King of Limbs — but a few days later, Yorke up and released a new solo album, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.
For fans of Yorke’s solo work, the new album isn’t particularly groundbreaking. It’s still excellent electronic music, dripping with Yorke’s eerily beautiful falsetto. And at this point, the sudden release of an unexpected album — even one by a music figure as renowned as Yorke — isn’t anything particularly industry-shattering. But Yorke found a new way to push the boundaries. He didn’t just put Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes up on Radiohead’s website; he put the album up on BitTorrent for $6.
Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes
For the uninformed, BitTorrent is a site that offers users the ability to torrent files. Unlike other forms of file downloads, torrenting works by having several users “seed” files from their own computers while other users “leech” the album, downloading it for themselves. Utilizing the combined power of several hosts, or seeders, files can be downloaded much faster. While torrenting itself is perfectly legal, it often has the reputation as the ideal method for illegally downloading large files, such as music or films.
With this release, Yorke seems to be dancing around the issue of illegal music downloading. In the announcement, he wrote that he intends for this release to be “an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around.” If more people learn to use BitTorrent, then more people can get the music they want without interacting with the bureaucracy of the music industry. Yorke’s intentions seem to be to have BitTorrent serve as a direct-to-users store like Bandcamp, but it’s hard to ignore the unspoken suggestion that users should just steal their music with this technology.
Yorke has gone on the record as saying that he wants to eliminate the middlemen of the music business. For those in the music industry, this is disheartening news, but for the musicians themselves, it’s part of the new era’s core mantra. Artists used to give tours to sell records; now records earn little money but hopefully encourage fans to come out and spend money on the tour. With Bandcamp and Yorke’s BitTorrent experiment, more of your money is going directly to the artist, allowing them the means to make more of the music you love.
It’s a difficult line to walk. Our generation has grown up with the ability to essentially listen to any song or album from the comfort of our homes for little to no money, and it seems like an unwanted step backward to stop that access. However, artists need the money to live and deserve to be paid for their efforts. Yorke’s experiment and sites such as BitTorrent and Bandcamp are the future of music downloads, even more so than Spotify. The artists get the money, the fans get the music and the only middleman is a website dedicated to bringing you the music with as little interference as possible.
So thanks, Thom Yorke, for staying at the forefront of the music world and for making your great and wonderfully weird music accessible.
