Radiohead play with BitTorrent
After having experienced the largely unexplored territories of unhindered digital distribution thanks to In Rainbows, after having “shot” the entirely digital video clip from House of Cards, Radiohead continue to seek alternative ways to reach fans and innovate the music market by releasing their latest song on the BitTorrent P2P network.
The track, These Are My Twisted Words, has been in the wild for a week, and according to the rumors followed to its distribution the mastermind of the alleged “leak” was the English band itself. Such rumors became stronger when Thom Yorke, Radiohead voice and frontman talked to magazine The Believer about a new idea for distributing their works.
On Monday, August 17 the band confirmed, by the mouth of multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood, that These Are My Twisted Words was the latest official creation of Radiohead. “We’ve been recording for a while - Greenwood writes on the band blog - and this was one of the first we finished. We’re pretty proud of it“. The musician confirms that the song, stylistically related to Weird Fishes/Arpeggi from In Rainbows, will be part of the scheduled summer concerts.
The post ends with two links for the download, one pointing to the band digital store and the other to a Mininova indexed torrent. In both cases the user can download the song without paying a cent, but the .zip archive available on the store contains an artwork and the series of images composing it to print and assemble at one’s wish.
These Are My Twisted Words digital release comes slightly after that of Harry Patch (In Memory Of), a song inspired to the last English veteran of the First World War recently passed away at the age of 111. In this case the download costs 1 pound and does not include a BT torrent, while the band assures that the entire proceeds will go to the Royal British Legion.
It’s still too soon to say if Radiohead are determined in intensively exploiting a P2P network like BitTorrent for the early release of their next works, surely the model “a torrent for a song” could be the ideal coupling for the new creative mood of the band, tired of monolithic albums and in search for alternative promotion formats.
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- In Rainbows downloads confirm: P2P attracts more, far more
- House of Cards by Radiohead, the videoclip shot with no cameras
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