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"Tomorrow's Modern Boxes," Yorke's first solo album in eight
years, features eight songs and was produced by longtime
collaborated Nigel Godrich.
Users will be charged $6 to have access through software company
BitTorrent to a "paygated" bundle of files known as a torrent,
which breaks the files up into small pieces which are downloaded
from one or more peer-to-peer sources, Yorke and Godrich said.
Torrents have been touted as a more efficient way to download
large amounts of data using less bandwidth, but some
torrent-hosting sites have been targeted by authorities as the
means to illegally distribute copyrighted material.
"It's an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are
something that the general public can get its head around,"
Yorke and Godrich said in a statement.
"If it works well, it could be an effective way of handing some
control of internet commerce back to the people who are creating
the work," the statement added.
Yorke and his band Radiohead have experimented with alternative
distribution models in the past, releasing their 2007 album "In
Rainbows" first as a download on their website where customers
could pay whatever price they wanted.
Radiohead's 2011 album "The King of Limbs" was also
self-released online before physical copies were released.
The music industry has suffered a steep drop in album sales
since the beginning of file sharing and online sales in the late
1990s. Year-to-date album sales are down 15 percent compared
with last year, according to music magazine Billboard.
(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
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Radiohead's
Thom Yorke will use BitTorrent to sell new album
