My Radiohead Experience

I am not a huge fan of Radiohead (meaning that I am not intimately familiar with all their music), but I do have an album or two that get played from time to time. That said, I am going to buy…..yes, pay money…..for their new album “In Rainbows” just because the idea of naming my own price is so revolutionary and great that I want to experience it personally.

Consider that I am not even a serious fan of the band, and yet I am still willing to trade my money for their music because:
(A) I know the money goes to the band and not some greedy executive at a record label (B) The tracks are all DRM free!!!! (hooray)
(C) I do believe that I should have to give them SOMETHING for all the time and effort they put into creating their art. And it’s not even that I feel like I have to, it’s that I actually WANT TO. Strange.

So….. I figured it would be fun and informative to go through this process together (if you haven’t already named-your-own-price yourself). I am now typing www.inrainbows.com into my browser, so hold on one second.

Oooh it’s nice and colorful. I get a page (maybe the album cover?) that has the band’s name and the album’s name and a link to ENTER. Clicking on enter…… Ok, now I get a little paragraph: “Radiohead have made a record. So far, it is only available from this website. You can pre-order it in the following formats: Discbox and Download.” And another continue button. So far so good, continuing on….

Blah blah blah, cannot access the download until tomorrow October the 10th, I already know that the discbox includes vinyl records, bonus tracks, etc. which I really don’t want or need. I am clicking pre-order….. and it tells me that the album download has now been added to my basket. I click on “view basket”….

And here it is. The item heading has “download” beneath it, my quantity is one, and under price there is an empty box. A nice little white empty box waiting for me to click on it and type in a number. Haha, is this for real I can’t believe it. Just to make sure, I am going to click on the red question mark next to the blank space just because I am so confused and amazed…. this must be too good to be true.

All I get is “IT’S UP TO YOU” in the middle of the page. Huh? Do they mean what I think they mean? I’m going to click on the other red question mark beneath that sentence….

“NO REALLY, IT’S UP TO YOU”
No shit.

I am now back at my basket, ready to enter my price in pounds. Pounds? Oh sweet, there is a currency converter here for me. What should I pay? I could be an asshole and give them like a few cents, hardly anything at all…. but I truly don’t want to do that. How about 5 dollars? I can easily afford that, I figure an album and all their hard work is worth 5 bucks right? Apparently that turns out to be about 2.45 pounds, so I type it in. Bada bing bada boom, type in some credit card info, where do I live, what is my email aaaand……..done. I just paid 5 bucks for the new Radiohead album. Brilliant. If I could get all my music this way, I absolutely would. Good for me, good for the artist, and fuck the Man. More analysis on this process to come in future posts.

Amazin Amazon?

I just want to give a quick shout out to Amazon.com for taking a step in the right direction (however small it may be) in regards to digital music downloads. As you may already be aware, the company has just launched a battleship to combat the massive Death Star that is the iTunes music store.

Its secret weapon: NO DRM!!! And they also knock off a few cents on certain songs just for the hell of it. It’s not yet payment optional (see Radiohead), but so far EMI and Universal (along with thousands of indie labels) have agreed to release their death grip on a few million tracks of sweet, sweet music to be sold without any stupid encoded restrictions so that if you do choose to purchase music you can actually own what you are buying and do with it as you like. That’s one small step for the music industry…….and uh…..yeah, that’s about it, one small step for the music industry.

How I was converted by Facebook

When I was a college freshman 3 or 4 years ago, I thought Facebook was the devil. At that point, it was still a relatively new phenomenon and not yet a social requirement. Myspace was just something that my little brothers did, and as I was too cool for Mypsace I was also too cool for Facebook. I remember swearing that I would never have a Facebook account. I didn’t want to conform to the stalkerish practices of looking up someone’s info/pictures, racing to grow my army of online friends, or searching out and “poking” the cute girl I met at some party the night before. People told me I would eventually succumb to the powers of the Facebook, and that when I did I would love it. What the hell did they know?

Of course they turned out to be right. I lasted maybe one semester in college before I gave in and joined. My first social network. People had told me it was addicting, but I really didn’t understand until I realized that I could literally look up practically every person my age that I had ever known in life. EVERYBODY was on this goddamn thing. The kids I used to go to summer camp with, my friends from my sixth grade soccer team, the guys I lived across the street from growing up…. You get the idea. After making a few initial friend requests, Facebook didn’t even need me to do its dirty work anymore; I would login daily to 7 or more friend requests from people who had been made aware of my new existence on Facebook from looking at someone else’s page. My Facebook came alive, and grew and grew itself into some kind of monster with a mind of its own. Sure enough, I began posting pictures and posting on walls like a good little Facebooker. Hook, line, and sinker.

3 or 4 years later, and Facebook is simply a part of life. I check it (sadly) AT LEAST once a day, not to mention anytime I am bored on the computer. Obviously I am not alone, as Facebook was pretty recently (I think in the summer of 2006?) the most visited site on the entire frickin internet. I guess there is something in creepily looking into the lives of people you don’t know that well that our generation just really takes to. But seriously, I got on board in the very beginning and within 4 years it’s the most visited site on the web? I said before that everybody was on Facebook, but now everyone REALLY IS. It is such a rarity for me to find a fellow college student without a Facebook account that I almost regard them with a kind of awe when I do. It’s like that kid growing up who didn’t have a TV in his house; very hard to comprehend.

So what does this mean? It means that Facebook (for me at least, maybe Myspace for others) has officially changed the way people our age interact and communicate with each other. Forever. I think my initial resistance to Facebook wasn’t necessarily anything else than a classic resistance to change. I had never seen or been a part of a virtual social network before, and I was hesitant to accept such a major overhaul to my social practices and activities. That is what Facebook has done. It has somehow (brilliantly) converted us all into online social networkers. Now the next time something smart and unique comes along related to social networking, I probably won’t hesitate to jump on the bandwagon.

DRM: Dumb Ridiculous Menace

By now we are all familiar with how frustrating and utterly annoying Digital Rights Management is. In a pitifully desperate attempt to retain some control over the free trade and ownership of music files, the powers that be created a technology that effectively hinders the use of their product. Way to go guys, that’s a great approach. Force upon us an actual DETERRENT to using your service. That’s definitely going to dissuade us from getting our music for free with no restrictions at the click of a button. I understand that those are hard, maybe impossible alternatives to compete with, but don’t take a frickin step in the WRONG DIRECTION! Oh wait, DRM is the strategy you employed after realizing that suing 12 year old girls for hundreds of thousands of dollars wasn’t really solving the problem of your unprecedented decline in sales. Good choice using oppressive scare tactics and litigation to force your consumers into buying from you. Riiiiiight. Another brilliant idea.

And speaking of that decline in CD sales, remember back in the day when you bought a CD how you could play it on any CD player you wanted to? Now if I pay to download an album I also have to download the “player” from that site, and my playback of the music I just bought is restricted to that device. That’s like having to carry around 10 separate CD players: one for Sam Goody, another for Tower Records, and an individual player for every independent CD store I happen to buy an album from. And their brilliant solution to the problem: iTunes starts selling selected DRM free downloads for MORE MONEY!?!? Why would I pay more money for something I can get for free and that should go without saying in the first place? I’m sorry, but if you want me to actually pay for my music, you are going to have to make it at least equally as easy to use it once I do.