OK Radiohead!



Kudos (or 'magical glory') to Radiohead for their briskly Web 2.0 distribution scheme regarding In Rainbows. To tell you the truth, if they hadn't decided to do this -- i.e., initially offer their new album only as a download, for which fans can pay literally whatever they feel it's worth, with the hard-copy version to follow this winter -- I probably would've just hit up SoulSeek instead. But I whole-heartedly support their idea (to the tune of $5.00, at least), mainly because I'm excited about it as a kind of in vivo experiment.

I want it to be demonstrated conclusively, in hard figures, that: 1) Given a choice, music fans will choose to pay for the music they like -- they're not the crooks the RIAA treats them as; 2) Bands can continue to make a decent livelihood dealing directly with their audience; and 3) Record labels are now about as useless as a football bat.

I guess a corollary of 3) is that if indie bands can make a decent livelihood jamming econo and doing it DIY up-&-down the entire vertical 'chain of production', and certainly huge pop acts with massive, established audiences can as well, then the contemporary music industry as we've known it is shown for what it is: a parasitic cadre of small-minded, money-grubbing lawyers and marketing hacks, utterly hostile toward art and culture, in both practice and principle. Who needs 'em.

posted at 11:37 PM