New Radiohead Album in 10 Days: Best Event in History of Humanity?
October 1st, 2007 by Cooper Levey-Baker in Arts, Music, News
Â
“Holy shit!” My exact words when I saw the news on Pitchfork this morning: New Radiohead album coming out in 10 days — the first official news of it at all, just over a week away from release. But it gets better: In Rainbows is being released in two formats, a heftily priced special edition and as a plain ol’ digital download. It gets even better: The LP is not being released by a record company at all, available only from the band’s website. It gets even bestest: For the download, you choose how much you pay! Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!
Send to a friend:
October 1st, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Jost ponied up $8 (converted into pounds, of course) to purchase the download version of the new album. Not sure why, but that sounded fair. Am I right? What’s the new Radiohead worth to you?
October 1st, 2007 at 3:40 pm
i ended up paying $10.10, or 4,5 pounds (for some reason the comma seems more appropriate there). i think what they are doing is awesome, and a wicked nice surprise as well. though, honestly, i can’t see this tactic working for other bands as successfully. it raises the question of how do you monetarily quantify the bands you like? and if i didn’t like radiohead that much, should i have only paid $3 or something? my point: i don’t trust the masses.
October 2nd, 2007 at 7:45 am
I agree that while the band’s plan is amazingly cool, it may not be the industry revolution we might think it is at first. Radiohead can do this only because a major label has spent the last decade-plus building them up as RADIOHEAD. Other established bands will no doubt following in the group’s footsteps, but any new band who wants to break in to the game will still need to rely on the giant publicity/marketing machine to get its name in the press and in the public consciousness, which may leave us with just the same ol’ system, stripped only of actual labels, actual discs and actual stores. I doubt this will really level the playing field much.
October 2nd, 2007 at 1:54 pm
i never really got the sense that there was a huge label to push radiohead into some category of being impenetrable, or RADIOHEAD, as you say. they’ve always seemed vaguely label free, at least from my conception of major label music and it’s manifestations. it always seemed that the music spoke for itself, they had a pretty ardent fan base, and didn’t necessarily need to play the game. they were that good. and while that “ok computer” era dvd “meeting people is easy” makes the case that mind blowing success can also be mind blowingly depressing, since then there hasn’t been a band as clearly non-conforming and singular as radiohead, specifically with it’s level of popularity. it seems almost natural that radiohead would do this, whereas other bands/artists, it might seem manufactured and with some agenda. who knows, though?
October 2nd, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Radiohead definitely controlled its own destiny while on a major label, like a handful of other artists who have managed to navigate the oft-perilous waters of the mega-corporations. Sonic Youth and The Flaming Lips come to mind as two who have done it for a long time without ever moving major units or selling off their artistic visions. But Radiohead still benefitted tremendously from the major-label game in terms of exposure. Would a video from a small indie act, no matter how good or audience-friendly, ever garner the kind of MTV airplay that Radiohead’s totally bizarre “Paranoid Android” did back in ‘97? I doubt it, and that’s just a small testament to how influential the big labels are, even if their hand is invisible most of the time.
October 2nd, 2007 at 4:17 pm
you mean when MTV still occasionally played videos, right? i don’t recall videos from kid A or amnesiac or hail to thief garnering as much airplay. but yes, they did benefit from that exposure certainly.
October 2nd, 2007 at 6:20 pm
It was quite awhile ago, wasn’t it? I was just thinking a week or so ago how I couldn’t believe “OK Computer” was a decade old. Whew.