The £ 13 million BitTorrent hit reported by Thom Yorke is “totally wrong” The Independent

Reports that Radiohead’s Thom Yorke made a whopping £ 13 million from a solo album he released exclusively through the BitTorrent website were backed by the screams “finally!” From those hoping for a direct means to music outside the shackles of conventional advertising and dissemination profitable.

But unfortunately for those who thought it had to be too good to be true, it was too. A Thom Yorke spokeswoman described the reports as “completely wrong”.

Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, which was released for $ 6 on BitTorrent last September, hadn’t come close to the approximate numbers that were talked about.

The news will be a blow to those who viewed the internet as a means of making livelihoods for musicians and artists, rather than just a means of distributing content

(Thom Yorke)

What follows is a claim following Taylor Swift’s decision to withdraw its back catalog from Spotify that the streaming site has paid $ 2 billion to artists to date. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said the company, which has 12.5 million subscribers, paid out $ 1 billion to the recording industry and artists from 2008 to 2013, and has paid out an additional $ 1 billion since then.

Yorke, who once dubbed Spotify and the music industry as the final “desperate fart of a dying corpse,” posted its recording on BitTorrent – usually the target of choice for those looking for Game of Thrones episodes to be illegally downloaded – as “Experiment” ”.

“If it works well, it could be an effective way to return control of e-commerce to the people who create the work,” he said in a September press release.

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“Bypassing the self-chosen goalkeeper. If it works, anyone can do exactly what we did,” Yorke said.

“The torrent mechanism does not require server upload or hosting costs or ‘cloud’ malarkey. It is a self-contained, embeddable shop front. The network not only transmits the data traffic, but also hosts the file. The file is on the network. “

Despite dire suggestions as to how much Yorke brought in the record (the reports with dubious math calculators range from $ 20 million to $ 1 million), it is clear that the experiment was successful within its range after being downloaded 4.4 million times became – a quarter of it in its first week. This sum corresponds to the One Direction album Midnight Memories from 2013.

While Yorke refused to reveal the true amount of Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, his spokeswoman said, “If only!” The £ 13 million reports were correct.