Radiohead are no strangers to BitTorrent after the well-documented pay-what-you-like “In Rainbows” album unofficially racked up many thousands of downloads using the protocol.
Late last week the band’s BitTorrent link was revitalized after a new Radiohead track leaked onto the Internet. After this advance release of “These Are My Twisted Words,” rumors began to grow that Radiohead themselves might be behind the ‘leak’.
Speculation grew on the back of comments made by Thom Yorke of the band to The Believer: “We’ve actually got a good plan, but I can’t tell you what it is, because someone will rip it off. But we’ve got this great idea for putting things out”.
Today, on the band’s Dead Air Space blog, Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar and keyboard) seems to solve the mystery:
So here’s a new song, called ‘These Are My Twisted Words’.
We’ve been recording for a while, and this was one of the first we finished.
We’re pretty proud of it.There’s other stuff in various states of completion, but this is one we’ve been practicing, and which we’ll probably play at this summer’s concerts. Hope you like it.
At the bottom of the post are two links to downloads, one directly from Waste and the other the original torrent uploaded to Mininova a few days ago. In fact, it was uploaded twice.
An enthusiastic commenter on Mininova exclaims: “OMFG! This torrent is being redirected from the radiohead official store, so there’s no album, just this song finished, this is very edgy, i mean thom yorke is way ahead from any other artist, at least we know he’s not doing his music to get some profit, at least not anymore, this is history being made, again, GREAT!”
Sounds like the first of many happy listeners.
Mininova is happy with Radiohead’s move also. The site’s co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak: “It’s great to see that artists use Mininova to distribute and promote their content for free. We encourage everyone to do this, which is why we provide our Content Distribution service.”
Radiohead uploaded the torrent the old fashioned way though, seeding it themselves. Apparently they are well aware of the latest developments in the BitTorrent community, as they used the newly founded OpenBitTorrent tracker.
