Radiohead frontman takes stage with BitTorrent to test paid torrents

BitTorrent's paywall system launches via a bundle from Radiohead's Thom Yorke to see whether fans will pay for content. The move could end up upending the crowd-funding world in the process.

Thom Yorke's first solo album in eight years is only available as a BitTorrent Bundle.Thom Yorke

If you think torrent technology is synonymous with stealing content, BitTorrent wants you to think again.

BitTorrent, the progenitor of the torrent, teamed up Friday with superstar musician Thom Yorke to make good on a two-year-old promise to figure out how to get people to pay for torrents. The solution comes in the form of a paygate built into the latest BitTorrent Bundle -- the first time that torrents have been wedded to payments.

"This first paygate, we're doing as a test," said Matt Mason, BitTorrent's chief content officer, "but we're testing a finished product. We're going to move quickly so that other artists can use paywalls."

Yorke's album, his first solo project in eight years, is called "Tomorrow's Modern Boxes." On the free side of the paygate, you get the song and video for "A Brain in a Bottle." Once you pay $6, you get the rest of the album: seven more new songs from Yorke and the cover art.

"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," Yorke said in a statement. "The torrent mechanism does not require any server uploading or hosting costs or 'cloud' malarkey."

Traditional torrents are a decentralized technology for sharing files of any size with a geographically disparate group. Notorious for fueling pirate sites like The Pirate Bay, they're also used to legally share music, TV, and movies. They're also used by companies like Google and Facebook to share large files internally.