Surprise albums are becoming, ironically, de rigeur these days. Beyonce popularized it. Michael Cera strangely got in on it. And U2 ruined it.
Now, Thom Yorke has gotten into the game. The Radiohead frontman shocked the world when he dropped his new solo album Tomorrow's Modern Boxes online Sept. 26. And that's not even the craziest part.
Instead of releasing the new album through more commercial music streaming services like iTunes and Amazon, Yorke released the album through BitTorrent, perhaps best known as a peer-to-peer file sharing site that many people use to download music. Yorke's album is part of the BitTorrent Bundle site, which allows artists to post their music and decide how fans can unlock it to download, such as giving them a special code or buying it.
You can download the track and video for "A Brain In A Bottle" for free on the BitTorrent Bundle site or get the other seven Tomorrow's Modern Boxes tracks for $6.
Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich said in a statement that the move is "an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around." The statement went on to say that if the album is successfully sold on BitTorrent, it might signal a way for those creating music to gain back some control over how music is sold, which is something many artists have complained about with current music streaming and download services. Last month, Garth Brooks launched his new GhostTunes digital music service citing similar reasons. Yorke also made headlines for criticizing Spotify last year and pulled the albums of his other band, Atoms for Peace, from the streaming service.
However, Yorke isn't all talk and no action. Even before his BitTorrent Bundle release today, he and Radiohead have experimented quite a bit with different ways of promoting and selling their music. The band launched its own psychedelic app PolyFauna back in February, through which they released new music this month. Most famously, Radiohead adopted a "pay-what-you-like" method for the release of the band's 2007 album In Rainbows, which actually proved to be a successful strategy for Radiohead.
For the purists out there, you can get your hands on a hard copy of Tomorrow's Modern Boxes in a deluxe vinyl version that also includes a digital copy of the album for 30 pounds, for around $49. That's a lot more than $6, but as we recently learned, apparently people are still really into buying vinyl.
