Pirate Bay to start pay site with a twist

The Pirate Bay is to start a new music site in which users will pay whatever they can afford to download tracks.

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The Swedish-based file sharing organization has long attracted the ire of the international film and music industries for providing a forum for people to share copyrighted material online.

In The Pirate Bay's new venture, Playble.com, users will be able download songs after paying a monthly subscription fee. The fee will not be set by the site's administrators; rather, each individual user will decide what to pay.

According to co-founder Peter Sunde, the artist will receive a portion of the user's fee every time his song is downloaded.

The site is being set up together with Swedish glam-rock band Lamont, which has long opposed the current structure of the record industry.

"After lengthy discussions about the future of the record industry and its implications for the many talented artists and songwriters around the world, we discovered that we held the same vision," the group said in a statement on its website.

Sunde told the Los Angeles Times that record executives have not taken kindly to the idea. He claimed that one record boss accused The Pirate Bay of "perpetrating a disturbingly Viking-like act" on the executive's livelihood.