A couple of days ago a new Radiohead track was released on the internet, called “These Are My Twisted Words”. Until yesterday it was unclear where the track came from, but thanks to a post on the band’s blog it seems the boys could’ve had it planned all along, as they are now linking to the song on Mininova.

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.

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.

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The chart supplied by the company shows the spike in downloads following the album’s leak in February, apparently due to it being accidentally made available for sale on an Australian digital music store ahead of its official release on 2nd March.

The debate is always would these people have purchased the album if it wasn’t leaked on BitTorrent clients? No one can really answer that question, but I’m sure that certain sales would have happened because of this.

Overall this does make me think that the claims of the Pirate Bay in the last couple weeks that “80 percent of all their torrents are legal”, cant be true.

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An essential part of Pirate Bay’s defense has been that the service is simply a tool that has many legitimate uses. The trial is entering it’s 6th day.

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Songbeat has launched a new version of their service which seems to be taking piracy to a new level.

It’s a desktop app that lets users search for music on Seeqpod, Project Playlist, Last.fm and other sites, and then download the files and import them into iTunes or Windows Media Player, or burn them as a CD. It’s free in its basic edition, which only allows 25 downloads, but users have to pay €19.99 for the premium version to download as much as they want.

This has to be illegal! They are now a company that is profiting directly from piracy. Not according to Songbeat: “The downloading of music is not fundamentally illegal. However, it lies in the hands of the user to discern whether or not they have the right to download the particular music file at hand.” Even Musically thinks this’ll end up in court.
(via TechCrunch)

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Techcrunch has been talking a lot about using music online as a free promotion tool, because eventually music will be free online. If record labels do use music online as a free promotional tool then they need to have other revenue stream. Warner Music is signing their new artists to 360 deals, in which allows them to have all revenues streams.

Somebody over there needs to put their thinking cap on, quit screwing around and just give the damn music away for free with no lawsuit strings attached.

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• iTunes Accounts for 82% of Total Digital Revenues for CD Baby – February 18, 2009
• Qtrax Signs Sony BMG To Their Ad Supported Service – December 5, 2008