Now Playing: Thom Yorke's Tomorrow's Modern Boxes deluxe vinyl edition.
Noteworthy as the first album released using BitTorrent's "pay-gate" feature, Yorke expressed that it was "an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work." He explained in his press release:
"It's an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around … 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 gatekeepers. If it works anyone can do this exactly as we have done."
A commercial and critical success, the album was downloaded over a million times within six days of release, and became the most-downloaded legal torrent of 2014; by February 2015, it had been downloaded over 4.5 million times.
I made sure to purchase the vinyl edition to serve not just as an agent for music but as a historical artifact of the war over digital media.