Thom Yorke was the most legally downloaded artist on filesharing service BitTorrent in 2014.

The Radiohead frontman released his second solo album ‘Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’ on the site’s community, BitTorrent Bundle, earlier this year. Over 116,000 people downloaded the free portion of the release – single ‘A Brain In A Bottle’ and its accompanying video – in the first 24 hours of it being available. Downloaders then had the option to pay £3.86 to get the rest of the album.

Yorke described the album as “an experiment” on its release. In a press release co-authored with producer Nigel Godrich, he said: “As an experiment we are using a new version of BitTorrent to distribute a new Thom Yorke record. The new Torrent files have a pay gate to access a bundle of files. The files can be anything, but in this case is an ‘album’. 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.”

Diplo and his label Mad Decent also feature in the top ten, The Fader reports. American hip-hop trio De La Soul and Vinyl Williams are also included. The top ten is as follows:

1. Thom Yorke

2. Diplo

3. Gramatik

4. De La Soul

5. Zeds Dead

6. G-Eazy

7. Ace Hood

8. Mad Decent

9. Vinyl Williams

10. Hundred Waters

