I'm a seed, I'm a weirdo —

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke teams up with BitTorrent to sell new solo album

But our purchase reveals issues with file quality options, future downloads.

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke teams up with BitTorrent to sell new solo album

On Friday, Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke delivered on a week of new-album teases and revealed to music fans what he'd been working on all along: his first solo album in six years (as opposed to releases from either Radiohead or his side project Atoms For Peace). The album, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, also marked a long-awaited return for Yorke: his first release to debut as an online product since 2007's In Rainbows.

Instead of unleashing the album's eight songs in pay-what-you-want fashion like last time, however, Yorke has joined forces with BitTorrent to sell the songs as a "BitTorrent bundle." Six dollars gives you access to the album via a BitTorrent file download, which users can then load with their favorite BitTorrent client to download the full album.

"It's an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around," Yorke wrote in a statement at BitTorrent's blog. Certainly, he has a vested interest in shaking up the music-distribution paradigm, having been a vocal opponent of sites like Spotify for some time. However, after reading the site's lengthy how-to guide for novices, complete with an apology for users wishing to download directly to their smartphones, we wonder how successful this experiment will turn out for the average Spotify lover.

Worse, as BitTorrent aficionados, we were surprised to find the experience somewhat lacking. For starters, we're used to digital music stores offering file size and quality options, but this BitTorrent bundle forces users to grab MP3s encoded at 320kbps. Audiophiles who want to buy lossless FLAC files must order the £30 physical vinyl bundle directly from Yorke's site (which, at the very least, offers immediate FLAC access to buyers).

More annoyingly, we didn't receive an e-mail with a link to the torrent file download for future use. Not that it matters; BitTorrent informs users that it serves "protected" torrent files, meaning they must be used at the same IP address and computer if users wish to re-download the album in the future. The MP3s may be DRM-free, but this hurdle to authenticating our six-dollar purchase in the future left a bad taste in our mouths. We can only hope the service amends this annoyance as it begins pushing more bundles; currently, the BitTorrent bundle site mostly consists of free albums which can be claimed simply by joining the site's newsletter system.

For what it's worth, our Tomorrow's Modern Boxes download of 208 MB through our BitTorrent client topped out at 1.3 MB per second, fueled mostly by a "web seed." Comparatively, peer-fueled downloads of the same album at piracy sites reached over 3MB per second on our cable connection. That's a small quibble, at any rate, and this author is enjoying the album thus far, as it serves up more of Yorke's downtempo, heavily electronic solo experiments.

Channel Ars Technica