Radiohead's Thom Yorke To Save The Music Industry With New BitTorrent Album

Radiohead's Thom Yorke has today released his new album Tomorrow's Modern Boxes via BitTorrent — the infamous file-sharing service often blamed for killing the music industry.

In a statement co-credited to producer Nigel Godrich, Yorke announced that "as an experiment we are using a new version of BitTorrent to distribute [Tomorrow's Modern Boxes]."

He goes on to explain that the bundled album files have a paygate ($US6) that Yorke hopes "the public can get its head around".

Yorke goes on to tout the initiative as a possible remedy for the entertainment industry's slump, offering: "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."

He sees this form of distribution as new way for artists to remain independent and self-sufficient — describing the method as "bypassing the self elected gatekeepers".

Yorke adds, "The Torrent mechanism does not require any server uploading or hosting costs or 'cloud' malarkey. It's a self-contained embeddable shop-front."

And before you forget there's actually new music from Yorke involved in this digital revolution, BitTorrent have outlined how to get in this new shop-front's door to purchase the album.

The bundle itself is described as a mixture of "music and video and art", with audio and video of one track, A Brain In A Bottle, available for free ahead of the paygate.

Watch the clip for the post-glitch pop freebie cut below:

And, check out the bundle deal here.

In 2007, Radiohead released their In Rainbows album as digital files on their website — asking fans to pay whatever price they wanted. Their 2011 follow-up The King Of Limbs took a more orthodox distribution path — but it was issued digitally ahead of physical release.

*This story has been edited to amend an error in the original version that included an incorrect album title.