Music listeners these days are moving in large numbers to streaming services, cut back on digital downloads and stopped buying physical – except vinyl.
In August, weekly music sales dipped below 4 million units, which is the lowest weekly figure since 1991 when Neilsen SoundScan began tracking sales data, as music streaming becomes the preferred method of obtaining new music.
So it’s against this backdrop that the major record labels really have to start thinking about how they can actually sell music, and it seems increasingly like they’ve decided they can’t.
Which has left a number of musicians deciding to take matters into their owns hands and come up with increasingly novel ways to generate publicist and move units.
Look no further than Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, who dropped a surprise solo album on the world. The album is available on Bittorrent, a platform that is usually associated with music piracy, and featured 7 tracks and a music video and can be purchased on vinyl or downloaded as a BitTorrent bundle.
“It’s an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around,” said a statement on Radiohead’s website. “If it works well it could be an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work.”
“Enabling those people who make either music, video or any other kind of digital content to sell it themselves. Bypassing the self elected gate-keepers.”
“If it works anyone can do this exactly as we have done. The torrent mechanism does not require any server uploading or hosting costs or ‘cloud’ malarkey.”
“It’s a self-contained embeddable shop front. The network not only carries the traffic, it also hosts the file. The file is in the network. Oh yes and it’s called Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.”
34,900 people downloaded Thom Yorke’s album in the first two hours after release, and at the time of publishing the album was pushing 350,000 downloads worldwide.
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So how’s Yorke managed to move so many units in such a short period of time? Firstly, at around $6 worldwide the record is significantly cheaper than most digital albums on a platform like iTunes where they regularly push close to $20. Secondly, although usually associated with piracy, using a platform like Bittorrent has given Yorke a truly global platform.
Matt Mason is the chief content officer at BitTorrent, and the driving force behind the company’s “Bundles” initiative, which gets musicians, filmmakers, authors and other creators to release their work packaged up as torrent files, with fans unlocking the full contents usually by entering their email address.
Thom Yorke isn’t the first to do this. Artists such as DJ Shadow, Moby, Pixies, and Public Enemy have already done the same thing, although Yorke is the first to charge fans a small fee instead of asking for an email address.
“We started talking to Thom and Nigel [Godrich – Yorke’s collaborator and producer] about a year ago. I met Nigel on Christmas Eve just gone in London. We didn’t think they were doing anything: they’d just had a year off,” Mason told The Guardian.
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“We met up and talked about BitTorrent: where the internet should be going for artists, where they saw the opportunities and problems today, and one of those conversations got onto the idea of pay-gates in BitTorrent bundles. And Thom wanted to be the first.”
“This is now what we hope is the world’s first direct-to-fan publishing system that truly has a global audience,” he said, referring to the 170m active users of BitTorrent’s file-sharing software. “It’s the size of Spotify, Hulu and Netflix combined and doubled.”
Yorke is a pioneer in experimenting with new ways for bands to make money from their music. Radiohead was the first mainstream band to release an album effectively for free online, In Rainbows, where fans were invited to merely make a donation for it to an online honesty box.
More recently, other bands have followed in their footsteps with artists like Beyonce dropping a surprise album with an accompanying music video for every song and a boycott of streaming services like Spotify.
Other bands like U2 have decided on a different approach. They too have boycotted Spotify for their latest album, but they also made headlines when they did a deal with Apple that saw their latest album forced onto every computer and phone that had an iTunes account.
“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.”
In 2013, Thom Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich pulled their music from the streaming service in protest at the Swedish-based music platform’s business model that pays artists “fuck all”, while claiming it is “bad for new music.”
Meanwhile, as Billboard points out, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek took to his twitter account to defend Spotify’s business model saying streaming “is now a very big revenue source” for artists and industry, while emphasising that its free streaming model showed no real signs of cannibalising traditional revenues like physical sales and paid digital downloads.
Ek pointing to recent successes like Jay-Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail, Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, “and others” (likely Justin Timberlake and Mumford & Sons) which all “did great while pre streaming their music.
