Thom Yorke - Tomorrow's Modern Boxes

Remember when the idea of a Thom Yorke solo record excited people? He's really proving the worth of his usual collaborators.

like, ok, this way Thom doesn't have iTunes or even Bandcamp taking a percentage, fine. but that only matters if an artist already has a dedicated fanbase that will seek out their record and spend money on it.

xp maybe i don't get the nuances of bittorrent though since i don't use it (and therefore i'm getting a friend to send the album to me, when i would have paid for it otherwise)

I can see labels loving the idea of cutting hosting cots yeah. Thanks schlump.

but Thom Yorke lol, he'll never win won't he.

Or you can shell out £30 for some art-vinyl in a static-proof bag.

Speaking as someone who owns the last two Radiohead albums on vinyl I've never actually played, I'm kind of... over the fetish appeal of such objects.

Just seems like a gimmick to draw attention to the release, and if the album were that good, it wouldn't have needed the gimmick.

What happens if/when the torrent dies from lack of popularity and it becomes impossible to download because only like 6 people are seeding it?

and to answer Maura's question, the letter was mainly distributed by social media no? that's how I found out. I don't see how that's the old model.

i don't totally follow - like that somebody takes a percentage matters in all cases, right, irrespective of whether you have an audience? - but it's still really valuable if somebody's just trying to figure out actual, functional, replicable independent distribution models. the internet is so promising & democratic & it still feels frustrating, sometimes, that the basic logistics of like, indie-ish, old-school-diy-analogous enterprise aren't fully developed yet. it means a lot to be self-sufficient, in principle as well as in terms of percentages, & the idea that people could distribute things very minimally & directly is appealing & empowering. there is a weird cyclical kind of moore's-law-rhythmic thing that means that ello will eventually be garbage, that everybody will periodically have to divorce themselves from once-benign proprietary go-tos, but there's still so much potential. the note about this album seems pretty ostentatious, to me, straining for the voguish feel of a kind of ripply innovative paradigm shifting ~experiment~. but it would be really great if people could avoid paying hosting for a film they made & uploaded! & the general technological landscape of the internet & our isp-afforded bandwidth allowances doesn't inherently prohibit that, & so maybe by using the spotlight afforded to him he gets to push forward a way for people to sell flowers direct from farmer -> consumer.

I don't think its a gimmick, I think Yorke and co are genuinely interested in new models of distribution, its naive at worst. I mean in that case any marketing idea is a gimmick.

06 There Is No Ice (For My Drink).mp3

I was having keming probs on my cell phone and it looked like Thorn Yorke - Tornorrow's rnodem boxes :(

the letter was also released by nasty little man to the press, who dutifully amplified the signal.

“Bypassing the self elected gate-keepers" indeed.

What happens if/when the torrent dies from lack of popularity and it becomes impossible to download because only like 6 people are seeding it?

― Greer, Friday, September 26, 2014 2:15 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like: this is an imperfection, at the moment, but i'm careful to say above that i'm talking about lower rather than zero hosting costs. archive.org is the only place i'm aware of that uses torrents licitly, to distribute its content, & it runs two trackers hosting its files. in the absence of others, you'd be downloading from archive.org, i think; when something's popular the hosting is widely defrayed & shared by whoever still has it. also just to be pedantic six people seeding it is fine.

And "Thom Yorke" and "Nigel Godrich" will certainly be more successful at this than "some guy." Does nobody remember the Saul Williams/Trent Reznor experiment, which took place (and struggled) in a less crowded, less diffuse landscape?

using your own popularity and fame to promote an idea of yours? how vile.

i don't totally follow - like that somebody takes a percentage matters in all cases, right, irrespective of whether you have an audience? - but it's still really valuable if somebody's just trying to figure out actual, functional, replicable independent distribution models.

true, but for me, the fact that you don't get 100% of the money when someone pays for a download is one of the smaller problems facing musicians these days. if you've reached the point where more than a handful of listeners are willing to give you money for downloads, then you've already cleared the tougher hurdles.

xp

06 There Is No Ice (For My Drink).mp3

― emo canon in twee major (BradNelson), Friday, September 26, 2014 12:20 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maura otm - i basically said the same thing on my twitter only not as well!

xxxp what would be the bigger problems musicians are facing these days? i am not a musician and i'd be interested to hear about it.

sure, that's fair, jordan. i am glad there are things like bandcamp & kickstarter, &c, & that seems like a good model where somebody taking a cut isn't necessarily inappropriate (idk anything about the numbers involved, maybe somebody disagrees. but it's so satisfying to think that things can be refined & that people can move closer toward control. even with little things. i slowly learned html over the last couple of years, & can now make like, adequate websites, if i need to; a lot of art has always been bound up in the character of its presentation & transmission & the progress in reducing impediments to the platonic-ultimate of that is nice to watch.

I don't know why I'm experiencing such, well, not just reaction, but revulsion to this idea.

It might be one of my first genuine "I'm old, and I don't get it" moments, when confronted with technology.

But I think it's deeper than that. It's not that I'm not aware of what bittorrent is, it's just that I have a *hugely* negative reaction to it. I'd no more go on bittorrent to get something, even legally, than I'd got on reddit or 4chan to have a conversation. It is, to me, a tainted thing, a tainted concept, associated with deep unpleasantness. And maybe that's unfair, but it's still my association.

And it's like, Thom Yorke wants to make his music available to ~bittorrent type people~ (libertarians in Pirate Bay t-shirts or whatever) but not to "middle aged people who like to walk into a shop and buy a CD" then he's making a deliberate statement about what audience he wants - as he is making a statement about distribution structures or whatever - and that audience feels like it's deliberately excluding me, and people like me. And it feels a gross slap in the face after 21 years of fandom.

So, its basically that the medium is more important than the message?

The medium is the massage, certainly.

Thom Yorke will personally burn a copy of this for any old person who wants an actual CD.

i just think "trying to get you to pay for something on a platform built off swapping other people's shit for free" is a funny way to be innovative. it's like some "mafioso trying to go straight" shit.

"My new tobacco brand will only be available off the back of stolen trucks"

I'd no more go on bittorrent to get something, even legally, than I'd got on reddit or 4chan to have a conversation. It is, to me, a tainted thing, a tainted concept, associated with deep unpleasantness....And it's like, Thom Yorke wants to make his music available to ~bittorrent type people~ (libertarians in Pirate Bay t-shirts or whatever) but not to "middle aged people who like to walk into a shop and buy a CD" then he's making a deliberate statement about what audience he wants - as he is making a statement about distribution structures or whatever - and that audience feels like it's deliberately excluding me, and people like me

feelin this/cosign

(altho tbf full confession I have never listened to Radiohead/Yorke and don't plan to start now)

Van Horn Street, the point is that TY and NG are touting this as a model that could be easily replicable, which is a stance that's a bit ignorant of their own privilege.

lol croup

also

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-thom-yorke-sells-new-record-through-bit-torrent-bundles-20140926-story.html#page=1

The Bundle for "Tomorrow's Modern Boxes" is the first with a gate that collects a payment. Matt Mason, BitTorrent's chief content officer, said "paygates" took this long to develop because "we're not building a Web-based experience that's only going to work in North America." It's easy to add a storefront to a website, Mason said; it's much harder to create a transferable one that works wherever someone might be using BitTorrent.

Yorke and Godrich were enthusiastic supporters of the idea from the start, Mason said. Although Yorke and his bandmates weren't planning on releasing anything for a couple of years, a conversation with Mason in the studio over Christmas changed their minds, he said. "They got it into their heads ... they had to be first, because of who they are."

The feeling was mutual. "We really, really wanted them to be first, because of who they are."

so this album was straight up INSPIRED by the possibility of putting a paywall on bittorrent

I don't have enough "UGH" for this right now.

Exit Song (For A Chief Content Officer)

well this record certainly sounds made for airplay at a tastefully appointed office

man...eliminating the middle man between user data and the artist...the possibilities....nigel, hand me those bongos...i just had an idea...

xxp i don't agree with their intentions, twice they use the word 'experiment' and twice 'if it works'. they have been trying to find new models for a while now, and the fact that they've moved from the in rainbows model show a little amount of self criticism.

just to throw this into everything: i remember it being really interesting when whichever radiohead record was released at short notice digitally for pay-what-you-want came out (in rainbows, right?), how afterwards there were weird pitchfork stories of like i think kim gordon & other people saying, WELL: I DON'T THINK THIS BUSINESS MODEL IS GOING TO WORK. & it had felt like such a beautiful, sensitive approach to how people actually behaved at the time, detached from a kind of confused, atavistic procedure that was still being carried out all the time inert to changes in the landscape. like records appear online, always, a little earlier than they're released, & are downloaded, freely, in rar files, & that's become this kind of popular-if-demographically-cliquish preview period; & then a physical or official-digital record arrives subsequently & is or isn't bought. & all they did was attach money to the first part of this, where people were definitely going to download an mp3 version of a record freely. & because that was a new, abstract, difficult-to-quantify commodity - what if you had to buy the leak, separate from the eventual product - they didn't set a price. that feels so intuitive to me! a lot of diy stuff happens along these lines; i am thinking of grouper, say, who is just always pressing five hundred records & selling them & then repressing them if people want more of them. it has awkward dimensions to it - like people are probably excluded, temporarily, from getting the record they want - but at the same time it's a sensitive, responsive, controllable way of doing things that fits with somebody's appetite or means or w/e. this just feels like sensible, progressive experimentation to me; that is obviously not without downsides but cf-winston-churchill-on-democracy neither are any of the other terrible options.

They should threaten to send people the new U2 album if they don't download the Thom Yorke.

curious if yorke's getting any kind of advance or equity from bittorrent for this. Be kind of ridiculous if they've got top officers of a tech company hanging out over the holidays and all they're getting out of it is the "chance" to experiment and a decent rate

i love the twist in this

And for Yorke, there's the risk -- no, the guarantee -- that some of those who buy "Tomorrow's Modern Boxes" will offer copies of it free through BitTorrent and other file-sharing mechanisms online, removed from the original Bundle and its gate. But then, that's true for every downloadable song sold on iTunes.

Actually, Mason said, he's seen the opposite happen. Bundles are showing up on pirate sites, and in some cases have been more popular than the versions without gates. Granted, none of those Bundles required people to pay for content. Still, Mason said, research shows that people feel differently about artists who offer them content directly. "They're also willing to pay a slightly higher price when they think the money's going directly to the artist," he said.

And it's like, Thom Yorke wants to make his music available to ~bittorrent type people~ (libertarians in Pirate Bay t-shirts or whatever)

this ain't 2005

I was going to say, like... wait, they're charging money for this?

This is a test-run for charging for BitTorrent content?

Like, OK, yeah, let me just give my bank details to an org filled with pirates, libertarians and haX0rs! What a brilliantly safe idea!

How about no.

but thanks to the data yorke will now know everything about what kind of ding-a-ling pays for a bittorrent and then fills in a survey about it

Yeah, like:

Bypassing the self elected gate-keepers. If it works anyone can do this exactly as we have done

but how can artists who haven't sold tens of millions of albums globally, don't have built-in fanbases and aren't guaranteed mainstream press for their every album release replicate this and have success? This was also true of their "pay what you want" approach to In Rainbows' release.

banks are filled with pirates, libertarians & hax0rs

you may not get as many credit card numbers as thom yorke will, but you can still get more people's credit card numbers through bittorrent's paywall than you would through the old channels

The only thing I trust less than a haX0r in a fedora & an Assange shirt is a haX0r in a suit with venture capital behind them. Double-plus-no.

banks can be regulated, prosecuted, nationalized, etc.

xp

greer do you think it would be a crazy dystopian alternate universe future if, in two years from now, it was possible to record a horrible ukelele album, right click on the 64kbps files you made of it & choose compress to paywalled .torrent file, uploading it for people to choose not to buy online, y/n

i guess none of you bought it? (i did, for an assignment.) payment goes through paypal.

that's fair. probably not desperate to go slinging by card details around there either. but a lot of this feels like Problems With Being Alive Now more than it does flaws in this terrible scheme. like doesn't Home Depot periodically haemorrhage card info under pressure? maybe it is shitty & nobody should buy it but I don't think exploring new options in clumsy inchoate forms isn't worthwhile.

confirmation of libertarian overlord ^^ xp

"They got it into their heads ... they had to be first, because of who they are."

The feeling was mutual. "We really, really wanted them to be first, because of who they are."

"Nigel, do you realize who we are??"

still find it funny that bittorrent is promoting how many people are checking out the free video (if that's what it is) but not saying how many people are actually buying the album

fwiw ^this^ is why people discussing the "specifics" of this "demonstration" bummed me out

probably am using a harsher tone than necessary, but this isn't a case of an artist checking out the big open field of bittorrent and seeing how he can make it work for them. Plenty of folks have been doing that for a while. This is BitTorrent Inc - the tech company that is trying to move away its open source roots, the company that makes its money off of putting advertising and malware protection atop the illegal trading it facilitated - now telling artists they'll let them put a tipcup in there as well. Why am I supposed to shut my brain off and say "hey it's a step in the right direction?" just because the company shares a name with a platform that's interesting?

this has nothing to do with making things better for musical artists. it has to do with a piracy-fueled tech company trying to "go straight"

For a guy with a supposedly keen "bullshit detector", Yorke sure makes some appalling business decisions.

considering the chief content officer says he pitched the bundle to yorke in the studio I HAVE to assume money changed hands. In which case this really isn't that different from the U2 album, in that a musical act decided to let their album be used to promote tech as a hedge against poor sales. This isn't to say Yorke doesn't genuinely think this is a promising proposition for artists any more than bono doesn't actually think apple is neat.

i mean "maybe i can work with tech execs to make the world a better place for singers" wouldn't be the FIRST bad idea Thom shared with Bono

This has some of my favorite Yorke song titles at least...

Nose Grows
There Is No Ice (For My Drink)
Guess Again!

The Miracle (of Joey Fatone)

I think the only two songs I don't really like are There's No Ice and Pink Noise. The former feels to me like a distant cousing of Feral or Fast-track and I'm not a particular fan of neither, at least Feral has a nice groove, this just seems too last to long without going anywhere. Pink Noise is supposed to be just a transition track and feels useless on an 8 track album.

Great idea, really hope this model has some success. itunes is apple and spotify is just glorified stealing so we credit to Yorke for doing something.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/26/bittorrent-thom-yorke-major-labels-music

“Major labels have really given up on selling music, it seems. Pushing Spotify to an IPO is what most of the senior executives at the major labels are concerned with, which might be something to do with the fact that they own a piece of Spotify, and will participate in that IPO. But it doesn’t bear any relation to an artist trying to make a living from their work on the internet.”

while this is entirely OTM, it takes gigantic balls to say it when your company makes its money off illegal downloads, and is now telling artists they can put up a paypal account among the piracy, as long as BitTorrent Inc gets a cut. Like, WHY IS IT you have an audience of 170 million users? BECAUSE THEY CAN GET SHIT FOR FREE.

http://www.elephantjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Picture-425.png

“Should we blame Apple for selling you a laptop? Why not attack the guy who invented streaming or HTTP? People misunderstand BitTorrent and think it’s something just for piracy,” he said.

“If you look at BitTorrent, the stuff you’ll be offered in BitTorrent and uTorrent, our clients... If you’re just using our websites and products, there’s literally no way to get any illegal material. That’s not what they’re designed for.

“They point you to – aggressively I might add – licensed, legal pieces of content. We’ve got over 2m licensed pieces of legal content – music, films, photography, books – in the BitTorrent system. And pay-gates is about helping publishers put more stuff on BitTorrent legally.”

I'd assumed this was some kind of anti-piracy measure but it appears to be as easy to steal as any other album.

Hey guys! Guys!

Listen this album is good I swear!

I really should stay out of this but I am bored:

"They got it into their heads ... they had to be first, because of who they are."

The feeling was mutual. "We really, really wanted them to be first, because of who they are."

I mean, look at the above quotes and contemplate on the levels of delusion that go into thinking like this for a sec.

kind of in disbelief that all the predictable news outlets are reporting

Today, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes has been downloaded over 1 million times. This number includes free downloads of the single and video for "A Brain in a Bottle" as well as paid downloads of the entire album.

Like, would you count streams of the "Anaconda" video as sales of the Pink Print?

Like if some VOD movie reported

Today, Nicolas Cage's KABOOM RUN RUN has been streamed 5 million times. This number includes streams of the trailer as well as paid streams of the entire movie.

rip and read, rip and read

so this has really grown on me.

yeah, i've been putting it on as i go home from work and have taken a liking to more of it

also we can all at least agree that thom yorke's solo music is at least 10000000 times better than phil selway's solo music. ugh, his is BAD

he's like the nephew that sang a cover at last year's thanksgiving and everyone politely clapped, and then the next year he came prepared with 3 of his own songs and an amp and everyone's just like fuuuuuuuuuck why did we encourage him

Heard "Nose" on a Dixon podcast (in a slightly remixed form, I think) and felt tempted to investigate after a long period of not feeling interested in Thom-y.

"I'd buy this if it was on CD," I thought. (Haven't read the whole thread but is this what everyone else has thought?)

Isn't Thom collaborating with Oxford University students on the distribution of his music?

First four tracks on this are really good.

I hated it when it first came out, but it has really quite grown on me. Ended up buying it as a Bandcamp thing.

This happened, though I didn't see anything in the media about it.

https://thomyorke.bandcamp.com/releases

(Unless this is a hoax. It probably is. A cursory listen of the first two songs...not good.)

by the cover image I would say it is a hoax

lmaooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2861466346_16.jpg

He will be joining the Paris Philarmonie for a couple of nights, debuted some new songs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpixMcZKgVs

More info

https://www.reddit.com/r/radiohead/comments/bajeeh/thom_yorke_minimalist_dream_house_megathread/

Better video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7PSmkj8J10

Seems he’s still in AMSP/SUSPIRIA mode

dope

:/ I kind of like it, but solo he doesn't have a lot of musical range.