Free Radiohead music pirated

This is exactly it. Even though it may be available from their site it is much easier and consistent just to grab a torrent. Also you don't have to bother going through the registration hassle on their badly designed website.
Even though I think what Radiohead have done is amazing, the service people want always shine through; I'll use Google search instead of Live search, Linux instead of Windows, and torrents when it comes to movies and films.

Kind of the same idea how Microsoft got so wide spread. 

Maybe people just want to try before they buy. Too bad Vista was not like that.

Think of it this way. I have probably never personally went out and purchased a album if I had not heard it somewhere first. Kind of like taking a car for a test drive. Nothing odd about that. 

If People despise the RIAA they will make sure they will actually go out and buy this album.

Vote with your wallet. Now is your chance.

The title of the article reminds me of the one-liners The Onion used to do. All in all I think it's good that Radiohead is making a fair but of money out of the deal and hopefully their idea will spread throughout the industry.

Why torrent when its 'free'?

Maybe it is force of habit

Maybe it's the legal site being slooooowwww.

Maybe its 45p to creditcard monopolies people really don't want to pay.

Or just maybe people want to hear the music first to decide what it is worth.

I think a lot of it is a combination of convenience and habit as I have also seen many freely available demos on torrent sites.

Err, but you could, there was a 30 or 60 day free trial available to all, can't remember the exact period.

It just goes to show that the distribution model of the main stream "Scene" is more effective than the corporate (iTunes, website downloads, etc) distribution models.

Main stream "scene" being a direct reference to the "Pirate Scene" this mainstream 'torrent' one much less hard core, however much more effective than the Pirate Scene in moving bits around.

Perhaps the suits should listen.

I don't know bout the rest, but I tried to get it off of Rhead's site, but it was excruciatingly slow. It took 35 minutes to grab it off TPB with a couple hundred peers.

Still, cheers to Rhead for abandoning the abusive recording industry. If anything, I'd buy their album over anyone else's just for the fact that I know ALL the money goes straight to them.

anyone notice how this album sounded like it was the unused material left over from A Scanner Darkly'?

I'm not complaining, the new album is alright. Their best new material to date belongs to the movie sndtk though.

The official site is not exactly easy to find, it's a bit hard to navigate (though not as confusing as Radiohead's main site) and, the last time I tried, so slow that I gave up. I do plan to buy the album "officially" (Radiohead are one of the few bands making good, original music these days), and I'll probably pay around 15 euros for it, but meanwhile I'm listening to a copy downloaded from a P2P network simply due to the difficulty in using the official site.

P.S. - The official album is in MP3 160 kb/s format. Would it be too much to ask for an uncompressed, or at least 320 kb/s version...?

P.P.S. - I wonder who will be the first band to distribute their music through Valve's Steam.

Radiohead is missing a trick here. Why do they go to all the trouble of providing a download site? Radiohead should just add a button to allow people to pay for a download, whatever the source. I'm sure they don't care how you get a copy, and they can save a bit of money on server charges if customers use P2P to download the music.

I think all bands should add a button to their website to allow people to "tip" the band in return for a download, from bit torrent or anywhere else. The RIAA won't like it, but I'd rather download and pay the band directly and avoid paying all the middlemen involved in manufacturing, shipping and selling a CD.

Unfortunately, I'm not interested in compressed music, so I won't be downloading this particular album. But if a lossless version shows up in a torrent somewhere, I'd love to be able to download that and pay the band for it.

I went throught the site and got my download address/code but After two failed attempts my address stopped working so I just scooped up the torrent instead. Later, I requested a new address and downloaded it from the proper site. Considering how poor things were working on the morning of release I doubt i was the only one. 


It's a start - but registering on web forms can't compete with the flexibility of torrents today. With torrent managers supporting RSS feeds, there's not even a page you have to open anymore to start downloading.

...was made a torrent themselves. Host the .torrent on the official site, block tracker access to any IP that hasn't downloaded the .torrent from the official site to keep the numbers in check, and save the people who didn't want to pay anyway the wait, as well as speeding the download up for anyone who fancied paying. 

Everyone wins. 

As for me, I tried downloading it legitimately from the site, but my patience only goes so far.

I bought it for 5£ of their site. took med all of 30 sec to type in my info. 15 sec to verify my creditcard and all of 1-2 min to download the album at around 2 Mbyte/sek(exact speed I can't recall). 

I fail to see the difficult part of getting your music Legal in this case.


Radiohead should put it out as a torrent, then they don't have to pay the bandwidth.

Didn't they have an album called "Ok Computer"? Maybe they are saying "Ok" to the computer users.