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Radiohead’s releasing their new album as a digital download through their site, and they’re letting the buyers determine what they’re willing to pay. You know, I’m not even really that big a Radiohead fan, but I’m very seriously considering going online and buying a copy at a reasonable price - y’know, $11.99 or something - just to show my support for the mere idea of such a huge band going out of their way to avoid the major labels. Anyone else…? Filed under: Rock and Alternative and Songs and News and Artists and External Music and Downloads Comments:
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I’m with you, Will — the band’s music does nothing for me, but I feel like I need to get behind this.
We’re not alone, either. I just read that the band’s site has been “slowed to a crawl” for the last 24 hours. Consumerist predicted Radiohead would make “hilarious amounts of money” from this. I’m sure they’re right.
Not a fan of Radiohead, but I am a fan of a band as big as they are, with a decidedly loyal and core fan base, sticking it to the major labels…and hopefully proving a point at the same time: that, when you’re a superstar act, you just don’t need labels anymore.
And Will, what do you mean $11.99 is reasonable? That’s NOT reasonable - that’s what you’d pay everywhere anyway (except HMV and their ilk). More like $7.99, I’d say…that’s a fair price.
I’m sure by cutting out the take of the label and/or distributor, an established band like Radiohead could capitalize on the free press and make a nice profit with this method.
Why are we not talking about it? Because it’s obvious that that CDs are now only backup copies of music.
It’s also obvious that the music-promotion machine is a stone age relic. The dude at Sony whose job it is to optimize search-engine results for their bands is more important than the Executive VP of A&R.
And God bless Radiohead for taking what looks like a gimmicky approach to selling music…it’s actually just a little preview of what shall be typical five years from now.
Still am not a fan. But I shall tip my hat to Radiohead for joining the 200os.
Oddly, the retro-70s jam bands were on top of this phenomenon 10 years ago. I think it’s because the majors dumped most of them (moe, strangefolk, a lot of big names who have big followings on the concert circuits and pack auditoriums wherever they go and can attract even more at outdoor festivals).
I worked one cube over from Strangefolk’s website manager in 2000. He had to walk me through all the ropes of file-sharing, which was how Strangefolk promoted their band, through MP3 swapping (the live recordings often tend to be just as good as the studio stuff, recording quality wise, when the band openly promotes swapping and allows for digital feeds off the sound board).
Once I was inside this little culture, I didn’t even give a crap about the studio albums. You pick your own rendition of the song you liked and made your own playlists. Your version of Strangefolk was the best–for you.
The band’s still rolling along, through mass personnel changes and all sorts of cultural changes on the music front. Their forebears, Phish, even packed it in.
All because of downloading. Sure, they put out occasional records via traditional labels, but that’s just to appease a small minority of the fan base who feels better when they come out.
(Mammoth records had them for one record, had it produced by Nile Rodgers–it sounded great–and it sold nothing and Mammoth promotply dumped them…clearly the band’s own self-promotion is the correct way to reach its audience)
Here’s the band’s taping policy, the implementation of which the band has built a base of thousands of fans and made a living for 15 years. Any band who wants to embrace its fan base and who realizes that downloading is now the norm in promotion can use it as an example–I’d ask the band, but judging from the openness of this wording, they’d probably encourage people to use it themselves:
“RECORDING MEDIA: In the interest of advancing the technology, or reverting to previous technology, use anything you want to record the audio component of our shows: wax cylinder, wire recorder, reel-to-reel, etc. The technology is advancing quickly and sometimes we lose sight of viable techniques that fall by the wayside in the name of “progress”. Reel-to-reel decks have all but disappeared from the taping scene for issues of convenience, but try it sometime: done right, the sound is amazing. But again, if you do record, keep it non-commercial. The scene shouldn’t have to be jeapordized by a greedy few.”
This reminds me of the bands like Marillion that would accept donations from their fans to record new material. That way, the band owns the master, and merely makes a distribution deal with a label. All money goes to the band (the label just gets a small cut, like Fox got for distributing the last three “Star Wars” movies), and they would give some special token or other to the contributing fans (autographed CD, special bonus CD, etc.). Radiohead has just taken that one step further, and with NO LABEL to get in the way (who knew Radiohead was a free agent?), they stand to make millions this way. Genius.
I have to send them some money for doing this. And for those of you who didn’t see the Fake Steve Jobs’ July post on Apple getting squeezed by the labels because they want more money per download, read this:
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/07/music-industry-nobs-have-finally.html
Can’t stand Radiohead (”The Bends” was the only one of theirs I ever enjoyed), but more power to ‘em for going this route. Juliana Hatfield did a similar thing not so long ago on her site, offering up 31 unreleased tracks that were previously offered at some point but were hard to come by, and fans could donate what they wanted, or not. I bought ‘em, and surprisingly it was some of the best shit she’s ever recorded.
Personally, I always did say that if I ever bothered to record another CD, I would strictly go the digital route as far as releasing it, as that’s what it’s all about anymore. The instant gratification minus the circular coffin it usually comes packaged in. I warmly welcome the death of the CD, as any discs I buy automatically get ripped onto my external hard drive and then shelved forever, anyway. And at over 3000 CDs and counting, I don’t have the fucking room for ‘em anymore (I did in my old house, but in an apartment it’s a totally different situation).
The record labels and rest of the big biz is just going to have to realize that a physical “format” is seriously going to be yesterday’s news sooner than later, and unlike the generation that bemoaned the by-gone days of the LP, mine and the up and coming generations aren’t going to give two shits if the CD says bye-bye. The iPod is seriously one of the most revolutionary and greatest inventions for music ever, freeing it from its static confines and allowing it to be where ever, whenever.
I actually do like Radiohead and I’m fascinated by this plan they have for “In Rainbows”. Of course, we’ll have to see if anyone actually buys their download or just $0.00 it and then circulates what they snagged.
The news here is not the death of the labels and the CD but the life of the vinyl record. Shocking though it may seem, vinyl has gained an almost imperceptible bump up in sales which, next to the CD’s decline, makes it look huge. Seems that those who are into the whole-package theory of music are gravitating back and are being rewarded. Many new vinyl LPs come with key-codes to download digital versions for free.
While it was once the domain of indie rock, a lot of major groups are getting in on it. Bruce Springsteen just released what is arguably his best album in years, “Magic”. The LP preceeds the CD by a couple weeks, allowing those with a penchant for “arcane technology” first dibs. The new Foo Fighters is also now available on LP. Both releases are priced pretty close to standard CD rates, both are on heavy vinyl stock, both are in expansive gatefold sleeves.
A little pricier but no less important is the White Stripes “Icky Thump” on LP and Wilco’s “Sky Blue Sky”. Priced a little higher at roughly $30 each, both are really well produced product and, in the case of the Wilco album, is packed with a duplicate CD.
Radiohead very well could have just gone with CDs for their box sets but made vinyl editions an integral part, and all this begs the question - once the CD has gone the way of the Memorex cassette and the singles set have cut their ties and solely download, is it possible that the long defeated vinyl LP may have the last laugh with actual music “collectors”?
DwD
Ah you hit this one as well.
Having been part of “Generation X,” pretty much the last generation that can remember what it was like to go into a “record store” and see racks and racks of actual records lining the shelves and being the format of choice, I’m not sure how I feel about the seeming resurgence of that format. Not in a business way, but just in personal preference. Even when I was buying and collecting LPS, they still took up the least eprcentage of my collection. Tapes usually won out most of the time thanks to my love of my Walkman, and I figured if I was just going to wind up taping the album to a blank tape anyway, I might just as well buy the tape to begin with.
Apparently I never gave much of a damn for packaging at all, did I?
Granted, LPs sounded better than tapes and making your own copy on a high grade Maxell blank was often better than buying the thing premanufactured by the labels, but still - portability was the key. It was certainly true for riding around in the car, and god knows how many mix tapes I made back then, but even that just plays into the current phenomenal success of mp3s and the iPod. It’s quite true; people have stopped wanting to wade through an entire album for a couple high points.
But I blame that partially on the CD format itself. Once it took off, artists got it into their heads to fill 70 minutes or more because they could, instead of sticking with the economical 10 to 12 song format and cutting away the fat. That practice is still going on to this day, and it makes sense that people are voting with their wallets and deciding to get select songs from a release instead of the entire thing. But again, it’s only been recently that people have been able to sample songs and such before buying, much like the old days. I remember when I was growing up, you basically knew the current hit single off an album and that was it - you had to buy the rest of the thing blindly.
It’ll be interesting to see how all this plays out.
>instead of sticking with the economical
>10 to 12 song format and cutting away the fat.
>That practice is still going on to this day,
>and it makes sense that people are voting
>with their wallets and deciding to get
>select songs from a release instead
>of the entire thing.
Well put.
I’ve been watching album times drop for years now. Suzanne Vega’s new one is just over 30 minutes. The Pipettes’ new one is about the same. Most of the albums I’ve reviewed lately have been in the 35-45 minute range, just like they used to be.
Sounds like evolution in action. Performers are seeing that people would rather pick and choose cuts, and have reacted accordingly but cutting away the fat like Jason noted.
I’m not planning on buying the Radiohead download, though. As much as I approve of this type of direct marketing to the end user, I’m still not a fan of the band. And in the end, no matter how low they are willing to go, I’m not spending money on something I most likely won’t enjoy.
Besides, with the amount of traffic they’re getting on this one, my $5 to $10 won’t be missed.