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.