Thom Yorke distributes new album via BitTorrent Bundle

So, I decided to buy the album, but first I downloaded the "free bundle" as they call it. It's the free sample of the work. It downloaded without problem with my client of choice (rtorrent).

Then I paid for the full bundle, paid, got the torrent containing all the files, and was surprised it doesn't work with rtorrent ("could not parse bencoded data"), or btpd ("bad data from tracker"), or BitTornado ("[Errno http error] 402: 'Payment Required'").

qBittorrent is the only client that worked with the full, paid-for .torrent file.

Bugs need to be filed...

That's just a heads-up for Linux users, I'm sure that the official BitTorrent client works without problems on just-works platforms.

I love that Thom and Nigel continue to experiment in this space, and having been previously unfamiliar with Bundle I was pleasantly surprised to see that several of my favorite artists/labels have released material via this channel in recent months.

But I'm not sure if I really see the benefit of this (for artists or listeners) over e.g. Bandcamp, and the more I dig into BT's messaging about Bundle[0] the less I feel I understand about the overall strategy.

[0]http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/06/16/bittorrent-bundle-hits...

I downloaded it after payment, using Transmission, but I struggle to understand how they can protect the sharing. If, as said in the help page [0], they are limiting the number of times a torrent can be downloaded, this breaks the idea of torrents.

[0] http://bundle-help.bittorrent.com/customer/portal/articles/1...