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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I think you should try to select a font and background that makes your blog even less readable than it is now.
2 Paxils and a straightrazor.
I just bought myself a copy for 10 pounds (about $20.) I meant to pay about $16 for the album, but stupidly forgot the dollar has sunk versus the pound since my list trip abroad a few years ago. For any who care to know, 1 dollar = aprox 2.02 GB pounds these days. You can get a quick conversion by going to Google and typing in "1 dollar in pounds"
I'm looking forward to this release. They are an amazing group and I'm glad they took some time to get the creative juices running again. Let's hope that this album is their best!
With no record company grabbing off the biggest share of the money, why not cut a deal with iTunes, or any other online store? Apple sells the album for $10, takes $3, leaving the band with $7 an album. That's definitely more than the $1.50 you mention. They can sell it DRM free for even more on iTunes.
To me, their "disc pack" sounds every bit as annoying as something that a record label might have come up with as a marketing ploy. If I want physical media, I'm shelling out a lot of money for a lot of stuff I don't want.
...you would have known than Jane Siberry (Issa) has already done this.
Although Radiohead probably has a larger fan base and has the potential to make bigger waves in the recording industry, Jane did it first and deserves credit for the idea.
I would love to see more artists (Real music artists, I mean) doing the same and leave the CDs and iTunes to the manufactured artists.
I suspect that Apple/iTunes and the recording industry have an "agreement" (written or not) that would preclude a band -- especially one that the recording industry feels it should "own" -- from selling their music sans middle man.
Also, consider how big of a headache it would be to potentially have to negotiate with every band who wanted to do that. Managing all those agreements while trying to keep the recording industry from pulling the plug on their content (out of retaliation) would be a logistical nightmare for Apple.
The only way we get rid of the record label leeches is to let them commit suicide. They were clearly going down that road for a good long time, but it's entirely possible that iTunes might have saved them. And for this good turn, the labels all despise Apple. That's the deal with money -- no matter how much they have, it's never enough.
While I am, for the most part, a Radiohead fan (I thought HTTT was complete junk, and Kid A/Amnesiac should have been pared down to a single, consistently solid album), I'm not sure I'm ready to buy into this so-called paradigm shift in the recording industry just yet.
I don't like the way the major labels have ruined the business and careers of so many talented artists. But the fact is that I'm sick and tired of hearing artists who want to pretend that they don't owe a big chunk of their success to having been associated with those labels. Radiohead, for all their revisionism, made their name and fortunes with pretty big label backing (EMI). Their first album featured a hit radio single and went gold. They've had very expensive marketing campaigns, and were given complete creative control. I don't think this experience is common at all, and if they hadn't had the great songs, critical respect, and most importantly, the sales to back them up, they probably would have had none of those things.
I just hope that the next time someone touts a huge artist like Radiohead or Pearl Jam as being game-changers, that people remind themselves that they never would have been in the position they are in without playing the game for a while at first.
Just an FYI for those eager for an actual CD in their possession without plunking down the &80 or so dollars for the deluxe discbox like I did (yes, I'm one of those superfans, even though I don't own a turntable). Per Radiohead's publicist at Nasty Little Man, the band is going to release a CD of "In Rainbows" in stores come January. They're in discussions now. No word yet whether that edition will include the bonus disc, though I expect that a hard copy of that will be released as well at some point in time. By the way, did I mention it's about time? It's nice to see the record labels on the defensive given how they've been ripping off consumers for years. I only hope that people do the right thing and pay the band what their worth (not two cents, but at least a few bucks over that $1.50 mark).
I laud what they're trying to do, whether they're the first to do it to the 50th. Ultimately there's no reason why there shouldn't be a thriving marketplace in self-published music. The market can decide whether a band is worth 25 cents or $10 per track. However, Radiohead's experiment will surely fizzle if they can't get their shopping cart and security mechanisms to work. Maybe they're overloaded but three tries later I seem to have failed. I set my price at $4 or about three times their former royalty. For a band with their size following I think that's more than fair.
I paid five (5) pounds. Yippeeeeeeee!!!!
Which, if Machinist is right is 3 and a half times what they would have made if I’d bought it on iTunes.
The infuriating thing about iTunes is that it hasn’t really changed the paradigm. Considering record companies don’t have to actually produce anything to create physical media, don’t have to ship or hold physical retail space, the cost (a buck a song) is still too high. And the fact that the artist is still out in the cold is doubly infuriating.
This model makes much more sense and it took a major act to go this route to draw attention to the fact that we don’t really need these middle men in the equation. (Issa doesn’t count as no one has ever heard of her).
Why point out that they made a bunch of money with EMI in the past? So what? Are they supposed to stick with the outdated model because it used to work? Why, then, would we bother to change any technology at all? The icebox used to be a wooden box with a chunk of ice in it and that used to work pretty well, should we still keep a bunch of icecutters on the payroll today?
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
