OPINION: Whew. That pounding in your temples? It’s not the tequila-and-schnapps chasers you were pounding back last night at the transvestite bar—that’s the sound of 1.
2 million bloggers, media analysts, music industry talking heads and java hut armchair pundits yammering on and on and on about Radiohead. And it doesn’t look like the hangover’s going away anytime soon. You know—Radiohead.
That obscure indie band from Great Britain who shocked the world a couple of weeks ago when they announced that, newly free of indenture to a mega-corporation (that’s record label to you, pal), they would be releasing their new album In Rainbows digitally on Oct. 10, and that consumers could essentially pick the price they were willing to pay for the digital version. (You could additionally pre-order a hard-copy edition, due in November, that would contain vinyl and expanded CD versions of the album, with the price coming out to about $80 in American currency.
) For the record, I paid ВЈ 2.00, which with the ВЈ 0.45 credit card transaction fee, came to a total of ВЈ 2.
45—about $4.97. Full disclosure: to me that seems about five dollars too high for a musical artifact that comes with no packaging whatsoever and, with MP3s at a mere 160kbps, offers sound quality substantially inferior to anything in my vinyl, CD or 8-track tape collection.
Factor in 10 cents for some card stock paper (to print out some bootleg artwork I found on the web for the album, natch) and another 30 cents or so for a CDR to burn In Rainbows to, and I’ve forked about close to five and a half bucks. I didn’t even get the proverbial “lousy tee-shirt” to show off my bragging rights. Out there in the real world, a survey by England’s Telegraph.
co.uk of 5,000 fans who downloaded the album revealed that “more than a quarter – 1,429 – paid either nothing or 1p for the recordings. More than half – 2,776 – gave up to £10, while 673 die-hard fans paid £40 for the deluxe box set.
” And a few nuts paid £99.99, which was the maximum price you could pay. I’m not sure what category my £ 2.
45 lands me in—borderline skinflint but still relatively sane, maybe? Griping aside, though, the whole experience of obtaining the album was painless and seamless; I put in my quarter, pulled the lever, and ten digital gumballs spiraled down and popped out the chute onto my desktop in less than a minute. (Record labels who service journalists with digital promos and make us wade through all manner of cumbersome, time-consuming procedures just to obtain lousy-sounding approximations of their artists’ latest magnum opi should take heed.
) Plus, it’s a pretty damn good record, one that brings elements of classic-period Radiohead (e.g., OK Computer ) to the table alongside touches of Thom Yorke’s solo album The Eraser and a raft of surprises as well.
To paraphrase one reviewer, Radiohead’s become Britain’s premier art-rock band, and on this occasion the “art” contingent in the Radiohead camp definitely held sway over the band’s rockers. The album will undoubtedly figure prominently on a lot of year-end Top Ten lists. Watch for a full review of In Rainbows in the December issue of HARP.
So anyway… media types who track this sort of stuff are estimating that Radiohead moved about 1.2 million downloads across two days. An insider “close to the band” is being cited as the source for that figure, said insider also suggesting that the financial tally was £4.
8 million in sales (not counting the pre-orders for the discbox set). Not a bad payday. Chris Hufford, one of the band's managers, told British reporters, "This has been an absolutely fantastic experiment for Radiohead.
I can't say what fans have been paying for the new album but it's definitely the case that more people have paid for it than not." It’s worth noting, however, that worldwide naval gazing and brow furrowing notwithstanding, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood essentially stated the other day that is was never Radiohead’s intention to initiate some revolutionary new model of music distribution (labels have been selling downloads for some time, duh) or even to give away its music as part of some elaborate marketing scheme, but simply to prevent it from leaking out to the public prior to the official release of the physical discbox. Radiohead is also apparently hoping that fans who dig what they hear on the MP3 files will be convinced to purchase the real thing in all its elaborate packaging and up-to-snuff sonics.
I think Greenwood’s comments are astute; Radiohead is the type of band who commands a fierce loyalty among fans, the type of fans who probably will want to own the physical product. Me, a Luddite who has zero-to-none interest in downloading and listening to crappy-sounding compressed music, will want to own at least the official standalone CD when it comes out in early 2008 on an as-yet-unspecified label that some industry watchers are predicting will be Side One Recordings/ATO. There’s already been some backlash (not to mention a lot of meta-navel gazing in response to the backlash… double whew.
.. sometimes a 160kbps MP3 is just a 160kbps MP3, Dr.
Freud!) as people trot out, once again, the “what is music worth to consumers?” rhetoric.
Over in the Portishead camp—the UK band reportedly has a new album just about completed—we heard complaints that while it’s fine and dandy for an established superstar like Radiohead or Prince to give its music away for free, what about lower-tiered acts who can’t necessarily make the same gamble that Greenwood suggests? But that argument is moot; if you believe the industry narrative of the past few years, peer-to-peer file sharing has already “devalued” music. So Radiohead hasn’t created a radical new model.
They’ve merely served up an additional option. If we’ve learned anything lately, it’s that there’s no one-size-fits-all “model” for bands. There are myriad avenues with which they can travel to reach their fanbase and earn a living, from the tried and true Get In The Van method, to working that MySpace presence like a motherfucker, to flogging music via ads and TV/film placement, to virtual performances in Second Life, and of course to the Radiohead Method.
You know, in the end, dwelling endlessly on all this—the “narrative” and all its tendrils—is a big distraction that takes away from that quaint little notion known as “quality listening time.” To quote the great philosophers at Stiff Records: fuck art, let’s dance.
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