anyone into a little radiohead.

if you dont know, theyve been a pretty big act for 10 or so years, and they just released a new album.

however, they released it online before they will release it on hard copy form. to buy it online, you simply go to their website, radiohead.com (ibelieve), and pay whatever you want for it. yep, you can toss them fiddy, or nothing. after you "buy it" they email you your code and the album is as good as yours.

i like what ive heard from the album, though im listening to it on laptop inboard speakers. i will be buying a vynil copy when available (why i bought the download for 0.00 english pounds).

anyway, i think this could have pushed radiohead into the tourny of cool. fuck record labels. RH makes more on their tours anyway. i was a little concerned that a free album would basically be whatever was leftover from the cutting room floor from the last few albums, but thats not the case.

i be one happy guy today.

yeah it's a pretty solid album

Apparently the download site is inrainbows.com

I really have gotten to like Radiohead over the years. They're a band who doesn't just sit around doing the same old bullshit over and over again. Every record they come out with sounds completely different, but they all seem to be "strap the headphones on and don't leave the house until it's over" kind of affairs. They always end really well, the last song on every Radiohead record seems to be really brilliant.

I'm happy they're trying to get around the record companies this time.

Every time I think of Radiohead I think of that old South Park episode with Scott Tenorman.

Been listening to this a lot - I really like it. It's a lot more polished than their last one, it kind of sounded like it was recorded in a hurry and poorly edited. So far my favorite track is "All I Need."

completely agreed. all i need is the best from the album, and right now i'd have to call this their best work. it just seems more mature and experienced than anything theyve done. like they took the great idea that was kid A and then mastered it.

also completely agree on 'hail to the theif'. i thought that record was mediocre. it lact the cohesiveness, some might say cogency, that in rainbows and some of their better works has.

Fully agreed, but I thought there were some monumental tracks on HttT. Myxomatosis, Scatterbrain, and There There were great tracks, but the rest of them were painfully boring, like I couldn't even stand to hear the first few milliseconds of "The Gloaming" before I shouted "hell no!" and searched for a different track. I don't feel that way about any of these songs. The best part about this record is the use of strings, the string sections are really amazingly well-done, not pretentious or pushy at all. Sometimes you can barely tell they are there.

The record has a very fluid and grown-up sound.

Ok, just d/l'ed it. Couldn't get it to work a week or so ago then forgot about it (I like Radiohead but I'm not the biggest fan, I've got OK Computer of course but the other two albums I've got are HttT and Pablo Honey from way back. Maybe just bad choices on my part but I was turned off by all the hype in the crowd I roll with about Kid A and Amnesiac).

Anyway, right now I'm liking Nude. It'll take a number of run throughs. Always does with Radiohead. We'll see.

BTW, the second disc in the box set has 8 (?) additional tracks. You getting it? Does getting this stuff for free make you more likely to buy it rather than take it?

If the rest of the material is anywhere near this good, I'll probably get the box. It's friggin' expensive, though.

Apparently the shit's already gone 1.5 x platinum, and they're making an average of $4 per download.

To try to put this in perspective, here's how record sales generally work: bands "make" less than a dollar on a CD sale, but it doesn't come to them as profit. It gets put in a bank account, and you can't touch it. The cost of making the record is deducted from that account, and then if the band's next record isn't profitable to the record company, they deduct their costs from that account. And only then does the band gets the money.

A lot of the time a record company will hand out an advance on your account, which is basically a check to help you with the expenses of recording an album. And dumbasses go and spend that check on big houses and cars, not realizing that they have to pay that money back later.

It's called cross-collateralization, and it basically means that recording artists don't make shit from selling records, which is why they have to go out on tour and sell $40 T-shirts in order to make any money. There is the occasional rare artist who manages to make a lot of money selling records, but it's very rare.

So when Radiohead makes 6 million dollars selling this record themselves on the Internet, that's 6 million dollars directly into their pockets, minus the costs of recording (probably half a million to a million dollars) and web hosting (negligible). Since Radiohead doesn't promote their records through advertising, they don't pay for marketing either. They're printing their own money right now, those guys.

I was generally aware of most of that (though not many of the specifics), but that doesn't answer my question of whether you will buy it rather than take it. Does them being industrious = you being honest?

I gave them $7 for the record. It's a lot less than I'd have to pay if I bought it new on CD at Best Buy. But I acknowledge that I'm being generous because I'm a musician and I understand what they're trying to do.

I don't think the "pay whatever you like" model is sustainable going forward. But I do think that people will probably be OK with paying the equivalent of $5 for high-quality, DRM-less music files that have no software licensing agreement attached.

I'm not asking about the d/l-able one. IMO its honest to pay nothing for it as its an option. To each their own. I'm asking if you (or really if you think people in general) will be more apt to buy the box set rather than take the extra songs that go along with the one's they've d/l'ed at their own price.

BTW, where did you get the $4 a download number? I have yet to see a report on it.

BTW again, you check out Freakonomics at all Mich & Telle?
That's right, I went old school.
Story about a guy who makes his living off honor-policy selling. Not "pay what you want" but still in the same ballpark.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04E1DA1431F935A35755C0A9629C8B 63

Yeah, I'd buy that. It's just the kind of thing I'd like to have, with extra artwork and vinyl and all that.

I never read Freakonomics. It sounds like an interesting idea. I read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and I found that kinda cool. I like people who write about typical stuff from a wildly different perspective.

6 mill streight to them, plus how much $ in free advertising due to having a novel and good idea?

i do think offering to give it away for free probably encourages more people to pay, though i suspect alot of people who would have bought it at full price (or a dollar per song on itunes) may have payed less. who knows what the max profit number is.

like i said, i'll be buying the vynil eventually, though i hope its available in a non 80 dollar bundle.

A link to that report would be appreciated.

Sorry Fool. The link is HERE. (http://www.greenplastic.com/news/archives/2007/10/radiohead-to-em.php) Apparently I misread the report - apparently the average is GBP 4 per download, which is almost twice the income I thought.

Double the average price and less than shipped.


Radiohead tore up the industry manual when they allowed fans to name their price to download its latest album, "In Rainbows," released Oct. 10. To date, representatives for the band have remained tight-lipped on the sales performance of the studio set. Edge downplayed as "exaggerated" reports that "In Rainbows" had shifted more than 1.2 million copies, but admitted the average price paid was "probably pretty close" to £4 ($8).
So less than 1.2 by the 18th of Oct. Still at $8 a pop, its hard not to be more than the $6 million we were talking about. Thanks for the link.