Far from high and dry

Thom Yorke most likely made $20m from ‘Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’

The Radiohead frontman’s latest solo endevour, released on file-sharing platform BitTorrent, also scooped 1 million downloads in its first week online.

6th January 2015

Never one for sticking to conventional release methods, Thom Yorke’s put out records in all manner of ways over the years. Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ was released on a ‘pay-what-you-want’ model, while the band’s last album ‘The King Of Limbs’ was available in a special newspaper edition - a format Yorke chose because of newspaper’s “ephemeral nature”.

Thom Yorke’s solo record ‘Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’, is no exception, and he released it September last year; this time, as a BitTorrent bundle. Available for $6 a pop, fans flocked in their masses to the file-sharing website. A week later, 1 million copies had been downloaded

Gigaom have done some number-crunching with BitTorrent’s claim that 4.4 million users in total downloaded a ‘Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’ bundle of some description - whether they opted for the full $6 package, or the free download of ‘A Brain In A Bottle” and its video, can’t be determined from the released data.

Assuming that a healthy proportion of those 4.4 million users did pay full-whack, though, Thom Yorke would have taken away around $20 million from what was essentially an experiment (BitTorrent take a 10% commission). For an album that didn’t even appear in America’s Billboard, let alone chart in it, that’s a pretty cool takeaway.

Thom Yorke - A Brain In A Bottle (OFFICIAL VIDEO) from Tommaso Colella on Vimeo.

Of course Thom Yorke’s fame has something to do with the astronomical total, but either way, he’s proven that artists can continue to distribute through new channels successfully - and earned himself the money to buy a whole haul of fancy new equipment, no doubt. Radiohead are back in the studio now, and how Yorke and co. will decide to release the next album is the next question. Will they bring back MSN Messenger for the occasion, or opt to do it via Snapchat? As a Tinder-only download exclusive to matches, or in a series of animated Tumblr gifs? At this stage, anything is plausible.

Tags: News, Thom Yorke