Thom Yorke - Tomorrow's Modern Boxes

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??"

first listen, i think it's pretty good. some of the tracks near the end reminded me of tago mago's bullshit tracks.

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.

― Van Horn Street, Friday, September 26, 2014 12:32 PM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know there are other threads about it, but let's see, people would rather stream for free via Youtube or a subscription service and those are not paying much to artists, general signal-to-noise ratio increasing, hype cycle is crazy, touring is expected to replace selling recordings for professional musicians but that's getting increasingly expensive and hard to do on a dues-paying level. seems like licensing is the only really decent source of money, if you can get it? idk.

i would considering paying, but not for some bittorrent shit. still waiting for mbv to show up on itunes too

marillion did this like 5 years ago (released an album on bittorrent).

payment goes through paypal

LOL

oh yeah, doesn't paypal take a percentage (on one end or the other) anyway? haha.

i wish he would have done bandcamp just to convince more big artists to go through bandcamp because that site rules as far as i'm concerned both as someone who's used it to put out music and someone who's used it to buy music and someone who's used it to stream music

Well, having now heard one track from it ( http://vimeo.com/107265790 ) I'm relieved that it's not as terrible as AfP (though granted that's not that much of an ask).

It's kinda frustrating, because based on that, I think I probably would like to hear more. But not if this is the only way of accessing it, no.

There are tracks all over Tumblr now, so I guess it's a question of rounding them up. I would still prefer to, y'know, buy a CD in a shop like the fucking luddite freak that I am, i guess.

agree to the bandcamp thing.

Atoms for Peace wasn't particularly memorable melody-wise but it's a very rich and distinctive-sounding album imo. i wish King of Limbs had sounded that good, instead of sorta muddy and thin.

3x to Bandcamp.

4th to BC

Found an album stream on Tumblr and I'm about three songs in.

And it's pleasant yeah, in the way that pretty much anything that has Thom Yorke singing over the top of it sounds lovely, even kinda boring garageband electronica. But really, if this were the same garageband electronica with anyone else singing over the top of it (and really, there's no effort at all to integrate the voice into the sonic landscape, like I've been listening the past few weeks to FKA Twigs and Aphex Twin, and c'mon, the ways in which talented producers can wend vocals into the music, try a little harder, y'know?) I don't know that I'd be persisting.

I keep waiting for it to really grab me and lift me above a duty listen...? Maybe this next song will?

Kinda realising now, how much of Radiohead is about the rhythm section for me. And the difference between Thom Yorke singing over the tightest rhythm section in the world vs TY singing over garageband electronica is really quite noticeable.

OK, the 4th track (The Mother Lode?) is quite pretty and spacey and floaty and wibbles on nicely.

I also like There Is No Ice (for my drink), I think.

it's on Youtube now

Is it monetised?

it's sequestered in a gated community run by gangsters

xp (because if it is and Yorke isn't getting a cut, irony)

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.