Radiohead's Thom Yorke releases surprise album via BitTorrent

Radiohead's Thom Yorke releases surprise album via BitTorrent
(Image credit: Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Seven years before U2 decided to force a new album on every unassuming Apple customer, Radiohead released their seventh studio album, In Rainbows, online in a landmark use of the pay-what-you-will model. And now, singer Thom Yorke has just unleashed his latest solo album, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, on BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing service.

Releasing the album this way is "an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around," Yorke and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich said in a statement. "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."

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Samantha Rollins

Samantha Rollins is TheWeek.com's news editor. She has previously worked for The New York Times and TIME and is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.